Gideon Calder

Values, Diversity and the Justification of EU Institutions

Liberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supranational. Focusing on the case of the European Union, this article aims to address a basic question: what kinds of values should inform the justification of political institutions facing a plurality of value systems? One route to an answer is provided by John Rawls, who famously distinguishes between comprehensive and political values, and defends the exclusion of the former from the foundations of a political theory of justice. This article questions the tenability of the Rawlsian solution, and draws attention to an alternative twofold conceptual distinction: that between minimal and non-minimal and between substantive and procedural values. Minimal values are meant to be as independent as possible of controversial conceptions of the good and views of the world, regardless of whether these are comprehensive or purely political. It will be argued that their endorsement may thus further specify the nature of what should be shared in order to justify political institutions in conditions of pluralism. In order to refine further the account of such a basis of justification, two variants of minimalism will be presented according to whether they invest substantive or procedural values. Substantive values qualify the property of an outcome; procedural values qualify the property of a procedure. The latter part of the article consists of a ‘face-off’ between minimal proceduralism and minimal substantivism, considering reasons in favour of the adoption of each. The result, we suggest, is a helpful reorientation of the political dimension of the value debates to which the multiplicity of values amid contemporary European horizons give rise.

Climate change and normativity: constructivism versus realism

Is liberalism adaptable enough to the ecological agenda to deal satisfactorily with the challenges of anthropogenic climate change while leaving its normative foundations intact? Compatibilists answer yes; incompatibilists say no. Comparing such answers, this article argues that it is not discrete liberal principles which impede adapatability, so much as the constructivist model (exemplified in Rawls) of what counts as a valid normative principle. Constructivism has both normative and ontological variants, each with a realist counterpart. I argue that normative constructivism in the Rawlsian mode, whatever its strengths elsewhere, is markedly ill‐equipped to deal with the particular normative challenges posed by climate change – and that that these doubts holds regardless of which stance is adopted as its ontological corollary.

Competence, Ethical Practice and Professional Ethics Teaching

Ethical practice has a complex and ambiguous relationship to notions of ‘competence’. Both, of course, seem vital elements of suitability to practise in professional roles across the settings of health and social care. But exactly how they relate is less self-evident. Is there such a thing as ‘ethical competence’? This article argues that there is, and that is it something which we might assess in the teaching of professional ethics. After comparing different versions of what a practitioner ‘competent’ at meeting ethical challenges in their work might look like, I argue (1) that ethical practice and wider professional competence (or, from the reverse angle, misconduct and incompetence) are integrated rather than distinct, and relatedly that (2) competence and ethical practice should be seen as achievable in tandem, rather than one being prior to the other. I then consider the model of skills acquisition utilised by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus—and in nurse education by Patricia Benner—and argue that while illuminating, it does not provide an adequate framework for the development and assessment of ethical competence. Rather, we need a pluralistic approach incorporating different forms of propositional knowledge, practical reasoning and orientation-based skills.

Conference Report: ‘Ethics and Social Welfare in Hard Times’, London, 1–2 September 2016

It seemed important and worthwhile, to the editorial board, to hold a conference to mark this journal’s 10th anniversary. And it seemed obvious that in 2016, the theme for such a conference should be the impacts of austerity: on society, on practice and on our sense of ethical priorities. The result was a very well-attended, vibrant, constructive and consistently fascinating event—punctuated by chastening messages, as would be expected, but full also of illumination, insight and surprises. We were delighted with how it went, and by the sheer array of contributions made by those taking part. This report aims to capture a flavour of it all.

Local natures? Climate change, beliefs, facts and norms

It is banal to say that different beliefs provide the basis for different conceptions of the good and diverse ways of life, the protection of which will seem to many to be paramount as a matter of justice. But what happens when those beliefs are about global processes of the magnitude of those involved in climate change, with the scale of their implications? How, and to what extent, should the diversity of local beliefs about factors relevant to climate change be factored into a normative response to the challenges it poses? This article is framed in response to the companion piece ‘Local perceptions in climate change debates’, which presents detailed contrasts between such beliefs in Peru and the South Tyrol. Focusing on perceptions of the nature/culture relationship as an example, I contrast ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ normative responses to evidence of such diversity in belief. Both are limited, to the extent that they dwell on the fair treatment of beliefs. I argue that normatively speaking, what is crucial is not accommodating diversity in belief – as if beliefs about the factors implicated in climate change were on a par with other beliefs about the nature of the good – but acknowledging the requirement to make ‘thick’ commitments about which such beliefs are most adequate. Alongside their fascinating contributions in other respects, anthropological findings can be crucial in this one. They will help furnish the kind of understanding of human/nature relations on which a political philosophy of climate change must depend.

Introduction: Climate change and liberal priorities

It is over two decades since climate change broke into the mainstream of public consciousness in the Western liberal democracies, duly to become a routine part of media and street-level discourse. Yet considering the nature and scale of the issues involved, it remains striking how small a shadow climate change casts over political life. It has yet to dominate (or substantially punctuate) an election campaign, or to swing a televized debate between presidential candidates. Evidence suggests it weighs ambiguously in the minds of politicians and voters – and in the endless heavily than ostensibly more trivial and fleeting issues. It has strikingly little ‘shoving power’ in terms of altering priorities. Thus, the public’s concern about climate change, as one report flatly puts it, ‘is at odds with its willingness to change everyday behaviour’ (Williams 2007, p. 23). While, according to a recent UK poll, 85% of us endorse statements that climate change is either already a threat or ‘will threaten future generations unless action is taken’, we are very much less supportive of suggested changes that might force us to live differently (Glover 2009, p. 2). So when it comes to strategy on climate change, both street-level ‘common sense’ and political ‘wisdom’ sit somewhere quite separate from the scientific consensus. This would not be so remarkable were the scientific issues arcane, or their implications marginal. But neither of these applies with climate change. An issue which – just because of its sheer magnitude and global reach – we might expect to have forced a thorough rewriting of the lexicon of mainstream politics and major shifts in the discourse of civil society has in fact done relatively little, in a deep way, to reorientate the orthodoxies of either. Meanwhile in the academy, climate change has become ‘mainstreamed’, if slowly, as a topic across the humanities and social sciences as well as in the natural sciences. This is a field in which events move on at a rate that generates its own momentum. In the period between the UK government-commissioned Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2006) and the UN

Soft Universalisms: Beyond Young and Rorty on Difference

Abstract Recent critiques of normative universalism have helped entrench a dichotomy between formalist universal egalitarian claims (typical of the liberal tradition) and particularist attention to cultural difference (in contemporary communitarianism, and in more or less postmodernist approaches). Focusing on the work of Richard Rorty and Iris Marion Young, this article explores whether, and how, we might find space for a universalism which avoids problems encountered by the formalist model. I argue that, while both Rorty and Young reject ‘Enlightenment’ universalism, the approaches of both contain covert universalist assumptions. They thus represent different forms of ‘soft’ universalism: approaches which are fallibilist about current moral knowledge but which hold out the possibility of genuinely inclusive pan‐human normative frameworks. The trouble with both is that neither, in the end, provides a persuasive basis for their own position – one which avoids an ultimate arbitrariness about the winning out of one normative conception (be it humanitarian or not) over another. I suggest that recourse to ontology, and the kinds of metaphysical claim deemed outmoded in the mainstream of social and moral philosophy, provide such a basis. I argue too that a conception of human being as relational, and of the flourishing of the individual as requiring relations with others, is the best‐placed candidate to do the work required.

In Defence of Political Parties: A Symposium on Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship:

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship does an excellent job at fulfilling both tasks. First, it offers a wide-ranging and sustained engagement with key debates in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory and analytical political philosophy. Second, it opens up new areas of research ranging from partisanship across time to revolutionary and transnational partisanship. In this symposium, White and Ypi re-examine some of the book’s main themes by responding to the commentaries offered by six political theorists.

What Would a Society Look Like Where Children’s Life Chances Were Really Fair?

An increasingly widely used term in recent decades, the central place of ‘life chances’ in UK policy has been confirmed by the retrospective renaming of the Life Chances Act 2010 (formerly the Child Poverty Act 2010). Alongside this, the notion that we should promote fairer life chances has gained purchase across the political spectrum. Yet this notion is loose and ill-defined. This article unpacks the term from the point of view of children. It highlights problems involved with defining and measuring fair life chances for children in suitably broad and non-partial ways, and argues for a plural measure. It outlines two separate dimensions where questions of fairness might apply, in terms of the life course, showing how a suitably supple conception of fair life chances would need to apply across both dimensions. And in light of this account, it suggests three policy approaches – to poverty, childcare, and the configuration of opportunities – which would help establish a society where life chances were really fair: not sufficient, but vital contributions. Overall, the article suggests that a commitment to making life chances fairer requires considerably more radical steps than the term’s recent handling in political discourse would imply.

'Of course we do': inequality, the family and the spell of social mobility

A striking feature of the recent rekindling of debates about grammar schools is how readily the priority of social mobility is pushed, across the political spectrum. Left and right will disagree about whether grammar schools promote it, but the notion itself seems scarcely up for dispute. This raises a number of questions. If people from different political directions are so united in their keenness to achieve it, why has social mobility been stagnating for decades? Why do the life chances of rich and poor still differ in such stark respects? Part of the answer, I’ll suggest in this article, lies in a widely shared set of ‘common sense’ beliefs about the family that severely limit the political scope for achieving anything like fairness for generations of children born into a society with stark class divisions. We talk a lot about social mobility while at the same time avoiding some of the uncomfortable places to which we would need to travel in any genuine attempt to realise it.