Eva Erman

The first systematic analysis of current debates surrounding the role of practice in political theory Should social and political practices should play a role in the justification of normative political principles? In several sub-domains of political theory, theorists have suggested that practices constrain principles in various ways. This book joins five key debates in the current theoretical literature that have been largely taking place in isolation and identifies common strands of argument and their shared problems. By illuminating these connections and cross-fertilising key debates in the current theoretical literature, it develops a unified way forward for practice-based political theory.

A shared presumption among practice-dependent theorists is that a principle of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the practice to which it is supposed to be applied. In recent contributions to this debate, the condition of epistemic uncertainty plays a significant role for motivating and justifying a practice-dependent view. This paper analyses the role of epistemic uncertainty in justifying a practice-dependent approach. We see two kinds of epistemic uncertainty allegedly playing this justificatory role. What we call ‘normative epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with the problem of value uncertainty in justifying applied principles when our higher-level principles are open-textured, that is, when their content is too vague or unclear to generate determinate prescriptions. What we call ‘descriptive epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with uncertainty about empirical facts, such as the problem of moral assurance, that is, the problem that the requirements of justice cannot go beyond arrangements that we can know with reasonable confidence that we can jointly establish and maintain. In both cases, practice-dependent theorists conclude that the condition of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach, which puts certain restrictions on theorizing regulative principles and has wide-ranging practical implications for the scope of justice. Our claim in this paper is that neither kind of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach.

In a previous article, we unpacked the so-called “ethics first premise”—the idea that ethics is “prior” to politics when theorizing political legitimacy— that is denied by political realists. We defended a “justificatory” reading of this premise, according to which political justification is irreducibly moral in the sense that moral values are among the values that ground political legitimacy. We called this the “necessity thesis.” In this paper we respond to two challenges that Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi raise against our proposal. Their first claim is that our argument for the necessity thesis is question begging, since we assume rather than show that freedom and equality are moral values. The second claim is that Bernard Williams’s Basic Legitimacy Demand demonstrates the possibility of giving political legitimacy a non-moral foundation, since it allows for a distinction to be made between politics and sheer domination. We refute both claims.

The central ideas coming out of the so-called pragmatic turn in philosophy have set in motion what may be described as a pragmatic turn in normative political theory. It has become commonplace among political theorists to draw on theories of language and meaning in theorising democracy, pluralism, justice, etc. The aim of this paper is to explore attempts by political theorists to use theories of language and meaning for such normative purposes. Focusing on Wittgenstein's account, it is argued that these attempts are unsuccessful. It is shown that pragmatically influenced political theorists draw faulty epistemological, ontological and semantic conclusions from Wittgenstein's view in their normative theorising, and it is argued that pragmatically influenced theories of language and meaning, however full of insight, cannot be put to substantial normative use in political theory. The general scope of the thesis is motivated by pointing to the general form of the argument and by moving beyond Wittgenstein to other philosophers of mind and language, illustrating how similar overextensions are made with regard to Robert Brandom's theory of language and meaning

The question of what role social and political practices should play in the justification of normative principles has received renewed attention in post-millennium political philosophy. Several current debates express dissatisfaction with the methodology adopted in mainstream political theory, taking the form of a criticism of so-called ‘ideal theory’ from ‘non-ideal’ theory, of ‘practice-independent’ theory from ‘practice-dependent’ theory, and of ‘political moralism’ from ‘political realism’. While the problem of action-guidance lies at the heart of these concerns, the critics also share a number of methodological assumptions. Above all, their methodology is practice-dependent in the sense that an existing practice is assumed to put substantial limitations on the appropriate normative principles for regulating it. In other words, we cannot formulate and justify an appropriate principle without first understanding the practice this principle is supposed to govern. The aim of this paper is to map out and analyze the common denominators of these debates with regard to methodological commitments. We will investigate how this practice-dependent method may be understood and motivated. In particular, we point to challenges that must be met in order for the position to remain both distinct and attractive

This paper analyzes agency in Pettit’s republican conception of freedom. By understanding freedom intersubjectively in terms of agency, Pettit makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate on negative liberty. At the same time, some of the presumptions about agency are problematic. The paper defends the thesis that Pettit is not able to provide the sufficient conditions for freedom as non-domination that he sets out to do. In order to show why this is the case and how we can address this shortcoming, a distinction is introduced between a thick and a thin intersubjective account of agency. It is argued that while Pettit’s freedom presupposes a thin account, he would need a thick account in order to elaborate not only the necessary but also the sufficient conditions of freedom as non-domination.

Within liberal democratic theory, ‘democratic accountability’ denotes an aggregative method for linking political decisions to citizens’ preferences through representative institutions. Could such a notion be transferred to the global context of human rights? Various obstacles seem to block such a transfer: there are no ‘world citizens’ as such; many people in need of human rights are not citizens of constitutional democratic states; and the aggregative methods that are supposed to sustain the link are often used in favour of nation-state strategic action rather than human rights. So what could accountability mean in relation to human rights? This article argues that discourse theory offers resources for approaching these problems and for rethinking a normative notion of accountability in relation to human rights. It is suggested that accountability should link political decisions to universal agreements through global rights institutions and that the link should be sustained by deliberative rather than aggregative procedures.

The solutions to moral problems offered by contemporary moral theories largely depend on how they understand pluralism. This article compares two different kinds of universal moral theories, liberal impartiality theory and discourse ethics. It defends the twofold thesis that (1) a dialogical theory such as discourse ethics is better equipped to give an account of pluralism than impartiality theory due to a more correct understanding of the nature of conflict, but that (2) discourse ethics cannot, contrary to what Jürgen Habermas claims, embrace the notion of impartiality connected to agent-neutrality. The article argues that pluralism reflects conflicts among values not only between but also within people and that discourse ethics can include both these dimensions since it recognizes the constitutive connection between deliberation and (moral) conflict. Thus, unlike impartiality theory, it can elucidate the transformative aspects of pluralism.

The practice-dependent approach to justice has received a lot of attention in post-millennium political philosophy. It has been developed in different directions and its normative implications have been criticized, but little attention has been directed to the very distinction between practice-dependence and practice-independence and the question of what theoretically differentiates a practice-dependent account from mainstream practice-independent accounts. The core premises of the practice-dependent approach, proponents argue, are meta-normative and methodological. A key feature is the presumption that a concept of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the social practices to which it is supposed to be applied. Closely related to this meta-normative thesis is an interpretive methodology for deriving principles of justice from facts about existing practices, in particular regarding their point and purpose. These two premises, practice-dependent theorists claim, differentiate their account since they are not accepted by practice-independent accounts and they justify different principles of justice than practice-independent accounts. Our aim in this article is to refute both and, demonstrating that practice-independent accounts may indeed accept the meta-normative and methodological premises of the practice-dependent accounts, and that we are given no theoretical reason to think that practice-dependent accounts justify other principles of justice for a practice than do practice-independent accounts. In other words, practice-dependent theorists have not substantiated their claim that practice-dependence is theoretically differentiated from mainstream accounts. When practice-dependent proponents argue for other principles of justice than mainstream theorists, it will be for the usual reason in normative theory: their first-order normative arguments differ