Ruth Chang

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict— what I call a conflict’s evaluative ‘structure’—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of ‘self-governance’. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society’s deliberating over the question, ‘What kind of society should we be?’ In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one.

Many philosophers are completely unaware of the world of executive education and business events, and Specialist Public Lectures often arise from these occasions. They range from informal retreats, usually held in some tawny spot of nature for the purpose of team‐building among the employees of a firm, to exclusive, luxury junkets for C‐suite executives and VIPs at a spa or golfing resort for the purpose of networking and “upping one's game.” Most public lectures involve a sharing of information – arresting facts or gasp‐inducing statistics – interwoven with a large interpretive claim, usually left quite vague. Metaphysicians can illuminate ideas of gender; epistemologists can weigh in on the epistemic authority afforded new technologies; philosophers of religion can reveal insights into character and secular civic education; and legal philosophers can guide debates about regulation.