Matt Matravers

Responsibility, Luck, and the ‘Equality of What?’ Debate

Ronald Dworkins recently published book, Sovereign Virtue (hereafter SV), appeals to arguments that are popular within, and ideas that are fundamental to, liberal egalitarianism. These arguments and ideas need to be distinguished and unpacked. The purpose of this paper is partly to do this and to cast doubt on the adequacy of various moves made by Dworkin. In addition, and more importantly I argue that the analysis of the ‘equality of what?’ debate reveals a tension at the heart of contemporary liberal egalitarianism between the Kantian aspiration to eliminate luck and the contemporary aspiration to do political philosophy without metaphysics.

‘Who’s Still Standing?’ A Comment on Antony Duff’s Preconditions of Criminal Liability

Antony Duff has argued that an important precondition of criminal liability is that the state has the moral standing to call the offender to account. Conditions of severe social injustice, if allowed or perpetuated by the state, can undermine this standing. Duff’s argument appeals to the ordinary idea that a person’s own behaviour can sometimes negate his standing to call others to account. It is argued that this is an important issue, but that the analogy with individual standing is problematic. Moreover, Duff’s account of standing needs to address two interconnected issues: first, when and in what way the state can lose its standing to call offenders to account, and second, over what range of offences.

Responsibility and choice

In this essay I agrue that contemporary Anglo-American liberal egalitarianism has at its heart a tension: the goal is to find principles of justice that are fair in respecting the distinction between choice and chance and that do not invoke controversial metaphysical arguments. This is a tension because distinguishing between choice and chance itself requires invoking controversial metaphysical arguments. I proceed by offering, and then examining, the thought that Scanlons distinction between ‘attributive’ and ‘substantive’ responsibility offers a route out of the tension described above. The greater part of the essay is taken up with examining Scanlons account of responsibility and the distinction between substantive and attributive responsibility. My conclusion is that Scanlon does not offer a compelling account of substantive compatibilism; that his theory does not, therefore, release the liberal egalitarian from the tension; but that this does not show that the direction indicated by Scanlons theory is the wrong one.

Justice and Constructivism

Albert Weales Democratic Justice and the Social Contract is an important book. It offers an innovative and original (proceduralist) account of justice. In so doing, it places what Brian Barry called ‘the empirical method’ at the centre of normative political philosophys attempts to generate determinate answers to moral questions. This article-written from the perspective of someone sympathetic to both the commitment to mutual advantage and the empirical method – focuses on the kind of argument it is that Weale is offering and in particular on the nature of his constructivist project. It argues that Weales commitment to equality lies outside the constructivist project and that this undermines his aspiration to genuine constructivism. The article goes on to consider, on the basis of arguments found in Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, various ways in which Weale might have grounded his egalitarian commitments from within the constructivist project.

Introduction: Toleration re-examined

This introduction considers recent work in toleration; the nature and definition of toleration; and the relationship between toleration and broader questions of political philosophy.

The culture of control: readings and responses

Taylor and Francis Ltd FCRI7201.sgm 10.1080/ 369823042000266486 Critical Review of In ernational Social and Political Philosophy 369230 p i t/1743-8772 online O iginal Article 2 04 & Francis Ltd 70 000Summer 2 04 David Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001) is rightly regarded as making a significant contribution not only in the field of criminology, but also to social theory and to ‘the history of the present’. As Garland writes in this volume (p. 160, ‘the central concern ... is to develop a critical understanding of the practices and discourses of crime control that have recently come to characterise a number of contemporary societies, notably the USA and the UK’. In developing this understanding, Garland deploys a genealogical technique in order to give an account of how the field of crime control emerged in the shape and way that it did. What has emerged in the USA and UK in late modernity is a ‘crime complex’ (Garland 2001: xi), which is animated and sustained by changed cultural assumptions and social and economic factors. These assumptions and factors provide the material for Garland’s survey of our times. Garland’s book, then, has many themes addressed in a number of styles: there is the genealogical account of the emergence of the crime complex; analysis of the profound social, economic and cultural changes of the last few decades; and a sociological description and analysis of where we have got to and of what might be to come. As such, it provides an ideal springboard for philosophers, criminologists, sociologists and others looking to theorise late modernity. In an essay that takes on that challenge, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks consider both the political responses to crime in England and Wales and developments within criminology from 1968 to the present. In so doing, they offer an alternative to Garland’s ‘history of the present’, not just in challenging some of the details of Garland’s account, but in suggesting an alternative method: an ‘historically situated hermeneutics’. This methodological dispute has wide significance. Ever since Foucault pioneered

What's ‘Wrong’ in Contractualism?

Brian Barrys Justice as Impartiality is an important book. One of its contributions to the discipline is a characteristically clear presentation of what follows if one accepts a commitment to equality, and the reasonableness of continuing and profound disagreements about the nature of the good life (the reasonableness of pluralism). I take the argument of Justice as Impartiality to be an important next step in the attempt to give an account of the content of justice which is impartial, fair, or neutral between conceptions of the good, and engaging with it has the great advantage that many of the criticisms that can be made of Barry apply to other liberal contractualist theories of social justice. It is faintly ironic that it is one of Barrys great virtues, his clarity, that makes it easier to see the problems inherent in the attempt to complete the impartialist project. I have not attempted below to offer a systematic summary and critique of Barrys book or any particular section of it. Instead I have opted to try to engage with the ideas that drive it at a more fundamental level.

Legitimate Expectations in Theory, Practice, and Punishment

Abstract This paper is concerned with how we ought to think about legitimate expectations in the non-ideal, ‘real’ world. In one (dominant) strand of contemporary theories of justice, justice requires not that each gets what she deserves, but that each gets that to which she is entitled in accordance with what Rawls calls ‘the public rules that specify the scheme of cooperation’. However, that is true only if those public rules are part of a fully just scheme and it is plausibly the case that no such scheme obtains in the real world. Given that, and given the centrality of legitimate expectations to theories of justice, it is vital to think about the status of such expectations in non-ideal circumstances. Having explained the sense in which legitimate expectations have come to play a role often previously associated with desert, a brief argument in favour of an ‘expectations’ view of punishment is considered to show that the system to public rules that generates expectations must itself be (in some sense) just. This argument is illustrated by appeal to just punishment and the relevance of thinking about punishment and not merely distributive justice is defended. In the absence of justice, one possibility would be simply to declare that there are no legitimate expectations and so theories of justice provide no guidance as to who should get what in non-ideal conditions. However, this would be to render such theories more-or-less useless in practice. Through discussion of a series of vignettes, the paper offers an account of how we might think about the demands such expectations place on the systems that give rise to them even in cases where the system is unjust.

Revisiting the Hart/Wootton Debate on Responsibility

Barbara Wootton — Baroness Wootton of Abinger — was, in the words of a recent biography, ‘a public intellectual who applied her searching intellect to many of the important questions which faced Britain from the 1930s to 1980s’. Critical to understanding her views was that ‘she did so from the perspective of a social scientist.… She had no time for social or economic theory…. Instead she wished to use the techniques of empirical social science research to identify evidence-based solutions to policy problems.’1 Her views on the criminal law, and in particular on criminal responsibility, did not stem in the main from theoretical, conceptual or philosophical commitments so much as from her commitment to social science and the evidence that (she believed) it produced.

Introduction: democracy, equality, and justice

In this chapter, we consider the relationships between democracy, equality, and justice and the ways in which those relationships define the territory of contemporary political philosophy.