Andrew Frederick Smith

Ben Berger seeks to provide a number of “modest proposals” intended to prevent widespread and radical political disengagement among citizens. This is the most adverse manifestation of citizens’ invariable “attention deficit,” or their incapacity to maintain the focus and energy necessary to remain deeply and perpetually politically engaged. While attention deficit cannot be overcome, its worst effects can be kept enduringly in check, Berger argues. This is a necessary condition for the maintenance of a functional democracy. Yet I argue that democracy in America, which is Berger’s particular focus, has not endured and for reasons that relate only indirectly to attention deficit. While certain of his prescriptions are worthy of endorsement, how to implement them must be put into a context that more accurately reflects the current character of the political landscape.

The quest for ecological sustainability—specifically via prioritizing degrowth—creates significant, often overlooked challenges for the chronically ill. I focus on type-1 diabetes, treatment for which depends on nonrenewables and materials implicated in the global proliferation of toxins that harm biospheric functions. Some commentators suggest obliquely that seeking to develop ecologically sustainable treatments for type-1 shouldn’t be prioritized. Other medical concerns take precedence in a post-carbon world marked by climate change and widespread ecological devastation. I challenge this view on three grounds. Its proponents (i) fail to treat type-1 as the public health issue it is, particularly within the context of what Sunaura Taylor calls disabled ecologies. They (ii) deny persons with type-1 an equal opportunity to pursue survival. And they (iii) presume without warrant that treating type-1 is an all-or-nothing affair. Indeed, research by biohackers points to suboptimal but potentially workable ways to make type-1 survivable in a post-carbon future—so long, I stress, as their findings are cripped in a manner that foregrounds the demands of environmental justice.

Symbioculture involves nurturing the lives of those in one’s ecology, including the beings one eats. More specifically, it is a kinship-based conception of food and food systems rooted in Indigenous considerations of sustainability. Relations among food sources; cultivators, distributors, and eaters; and the land they share are sustainable when they function as extended kinship arrangements. Symbioculture hereby offers salient means to resist the ecocidal, agroindustrial food system that currently dominates transnationally in a manner that responds to the urgent need—both in terms of Indigenous justice and prudence for us all—to decolonize foodways and decommodify food, food-based knowledge, and food labor.

Centering Indigenous philosophical considerations, ecologies are best understood as kinship arrangements among humans, other-than-human beings, and spiritual and abiotic entities who together through the land share a sphere of responsibility based on both care and what Daniel Wildcat calls “multigenerational spatial knowledge.” Ecologically speaking, all kin can become persons by participating in processes of socialization whereby one engages in practices and performances that support responsible relations both within and across ecologies. Spheres of responsibility are not operable strictly within human relationships, nor do what count as responsibilities necessarily center on the human. No being is born a person or automatically earns this status. Personhood must be gained and can be lost. Indeed, under current ecological conditions across the planet, we arguably inhabit a world full of marginal cases.

_In a recent article, William Rees defends the proposition that ecological overshoot will propel human population decline in coming decades. He rightly highlights that decreasing energy availability will contribute to this demographic shift, although he understates the significance of this phenomenon. He is also correct to expect ecological overshoot to be inadequately addressed. Yet Rees’s reasoning betrays stark __neglect of the colonial roots of ecological overshoot and why it goes unaddressed. This leads him to reinforce the discursive dynamics driving ecological overshoot despite avowing to criticize them. Ultimately, he makes several specious colonialist assumptions about the primary drivers of ecological overshoot. He also fails to recognize that human population decline will occur even if a suitable energy and infrastructure transition takes place. Is such a decline inevitable, as Rees claims? Yes, but this is not for the reasons he suggests. A careful analysis of his argument shows why._.

It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change.

We members of settler colonial culture—the latest form of what novelist and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls Taker culture—are constrained by myriad institutions that leave us with little choice but to engage in practices that are profoundly damaging to the planet, to others, and to ourselves. Our path to living otherwise, Andrew Frederick Smith argues, lies in the threefold struggle, which is inspired by Quinn's focus on the interweaving roots of ecological, social, and personal wellbeing. These three forms of wellbeing are co-implicated. We cannot enjoy one without equally enjoying the others; they are a package deal. As such, what works for people individually and collectively works for the planet, and vice versa. Reclaiming our lives and revitalizing our human and more-than-human communities are salient acts of resistance against Taker culture. They offer means of escape from our cultural captivity and an opportunity for full-spectrum wellbeing.

In recent writings, both John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas address how to ensure that all reasonable citizens have the capacity to live a good life when there exist in modern society a wide variety of competing conceptions thereof. Yet, according to James Bohman, both thinkers in fact fail to resolve this “dilemma of the good.” He offers a deliberative conception of democracy intended to make up for their shortcomings. I argue, however, that Bohman’s conception covertly relies upon moderately perfectionist values that cause him to fall prey to what Bert van den Brink calls the “tragic predicament” of liberalism: he cannot articulate howa resolution to the dilemma of the good can (seem to) be achieved without defending ideals that let some doctrines of the good life appear more worthy of state promotion than others. But far from undermining Bohman’s conception, explicit acknowledgement of his moderate perfectionism can, ironically, serve to strengthen it.

Many proponents of deliberative democracy expect reasonable citizens to engage in rational argumentation. However, this expectation runs up against findings by behavioral economists and social psychologists revealing the extent to which normal cognitive functions are influenced by bounded rationality. Individuals regularly utilize an array of biases in the process of making decisions, which inhibits our argumentative capacities by adversely affecting our ability and willingness to be self-critical and to give due consideration to others’ interests. Although these biases cannot be overcome, I draw on scientifically corroborated insights offered by Adam Smith to show that they can be kept in check if certain affective and cognitive capacities are cultivated. Smith provides a compelling account of how to foster sympathetic, impartial, and projective role-taking in the process of interacting with others, which can greatly enhance our capacity and willingness to critically assess our own interests and fairly consider those of others

In this review I argue that while Berger makes out a good argument that the language of civic engagement covers too much (and hence too little) and that education plays a vital role in developing civic-minded sensibilities, I am less sanguine that the strategies for the reform of our “attention deficit democracy” will achieve the desired effect in a political society dominated by the corrupting influence of corporations who actively seek to undermine just such sensibilities as anathema to their objectives. As corporate objectives become more and more wedded to the state, so too reform becomes less and less likely to be successful. An excellent example of this is the power wielded by the current incarnation of the fossil fuel empire and it’s influence over law-making concerning hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania. While I applaud Berger’s objectives, I am no longer convinced that pragmatism and not a more revolutionary approach can fulfill Berger’s—and my own—democratic ideals.

White progressives in the United States are currently experiencing two profound reckonings that typically are assumed to be unrelated. On one hand, the Dobbs verdict overturned the assumption that the right to choose with respect to abortion is too socially entrenched, juridically settled, or politically sacred to be denied. On the other hand, climatological conditions for possibly having a comfortable existence are increasingly under threat in locales in which residents have come to expect to enjoy secure lives and livelihoods. This article highlights what Indigenous communities across the United States already know well. Namely, threats to reproductive freedom and climate crisis are neither new nor separable. Both phenomena have common colonial roots that continue to proliferate, each a result of the disruption and destruction of Indigenous kinship assemblages. Indeed, in aiming to remediate their current reckonings, white progressives routinely (if unthinkingly) support forms of settler-state violence that perpetuate reproductive and climate injustice in Indigenous communities. The authors appeal to white progressives, notably including white feminists, to embrace the proposition that their reckonings cannot be properly understood nor successfully addressed without prioritizing Indigenous futurity. They call for centering forms of Indigenous feminist praxis that facilitate robust Indigenous coalitions of anti-colonial resistance.

I here argue against the viability of Peter Ludlow’s modified version of Paul Boghossian’s argument for the incompatibility of semantic externalism and authoritative self-knowledge. Ludlow contends that slow switching is not merely actual but is, moreover, prevalent; it can occur whenever we shift between localized linguistic communities. It is therefore quite possible, he maintains, that we undergo unwitting shifts in our mental content on a regular basis. However, there is good reason to accept as plausible that despite their prevalence we are in fact able to readily adapt to such switches, as well as to the shifts in mental content that accompany them. The prevalence of slow switching between linguistic communities does not then necessarily entail incompatibility after all

In this essay, I offer a twofold defense of homelessness. First, I argue that specifiable socio-economic forms of organization that are common among the homeless and that operate at least partially independently of state and philanthropic institutions embody valuable and worthwhile ways to live and to make a living. Second, the norms underlying the current institutional response to homelessness facilitate psychological distress and social fragmentation not just among the homeless but among the housed as well. As a result, the ways in which the homeless seek to live and to make a living may be conducive to the wellbeing of the housed as well.

The processes associated with globalization have reinforced and even increased prevailing conditions of inequality among human beings with respect to their political, economic, cultural, and social opportunities. Yet-or perhaps precisely because of this trend-there has been, within political philosophy, an observable tendency to question whether equality in fact should be treated a as central value within a theory of justice. In response, I examine a number of nonegalitarian positions to try to show that the concept of equality cannot be dispensed with in any adequate consideration of justice.

Commonplace among deliberative theorists is the view that, when defending preferred laws and policies, citizens should appeal only to reasons they expect others reasonably to accept. This view has been challenged on the grounds that it places an undue burden on religious citizens who feel duty-bound to appeal to religious reasons to justify preferred positions. In response, I develop a conception of democratic deliberation that provides unlimited latitude regarding the sorts of reasons that can be introduced, so long as one is prepared to defend them against criticism. Moreover, I contend that religious citizens have a powerful incentive, based on their religious convictions, to be fully responsive to criticism. I defend this proposition by drawing on Robert Erlewine’s account of Hermann Cohen’s ‘religion of reason’.