On the Relationship between Truth and Liberal Politics
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
Challenging Political Theory: Pluralism and Method in the Work of Bernard Williams
This article focuses on the recent surge of reflection within political theory on methodological issues and the emergence of new approaches in that discipline. Situating itself in a discussion of New Realism and its critiques of/divergences from the ideal approach of “high liberalism”, it engages the dominant reading and use of the work of Bernard Williams in that literature. Illustrating how the framework of political realism in this reading is plagued by a narrowing of the political and exclusive focus on stability, it turns to a series of resources within Williams’s larger thought in order to draw out an alternative reading of his model of political theory. Focusing on his methodological reflections on naturalism and historicism, it illustrates a conception of political thought as a form of situated socio-political criticism which stands in stark contrast to the “conceptual analysis of the political” that he overtly offers and has been the central object of focus within recent discussions. Arguing that the former avoids the pitfalls the latter encounters, this article illustrates how Williams’s naturalistic and historicist conception of political thought is more thoroughly pluralistic, both methodologically and politically. Finally, it illustrates how this reading brings him much closer to another position within the current surge of methodological reflection within political theory that takes him away from new realism. Turning to James Tully’s “public philosophy” reveals a similar emphasis on the democratic and pluralistic conditions of political thinking.
Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?
By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.