Susan Mendus

Argues that a form of impartialism that is grounded in the partial concerns we have for others can be shown to be congruent with the good of the agent, and that such congruence does not imply commitment to a specific comprehensive conception of the good. If correct, this argument has important consequences for liberalism at the political level. It suggests that the defence of stability, which Rawls advocates in A Theory of Justice need not depend upon commitment to a comprehensive, and Kantian, conception of the good. Justice can be shown to have moral priority, while at the same time acknowledging the permanence of pluralism about the good.

This chapter asks whether and why impartial morality can be commended to those who do not antecedently feel its force. Can the care and concern we feel for particular others provide a reason for adopting impartial moral philosophy? I argue that, unlike commitment to equality, concern for particular others is sufficiently widespread to provide a foundation for impartial morality that does not presuppose any particular comprehensive conception of the good and which, for that reason, is compatible with the permanence of pluralism.

In his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Raymond Chandler describes the world of the American detective story as ‘a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety’. Nevertheless, ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ What are the possibilities of being such a man in the world as we know it? The hero of the American detective story is not only a good man, and a man of honour, but also a man who must get things done. In Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest he is the man who is sent in to clean up the pig-sty that is Poisonville, and in so doing he becomes poisoned himself. He has a choice between being effective and being good, but he cannot be both together. ‘Poisonville is right’, he says despairingly. ‘It's poisoned me.’

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women

There is widespread agreement that politics calls for dirty hands in general, and for secrecy and duplicity in particular. The claim is, of course, most famously made by Machiavelli in The Prince, but it is also to be found in Book 3 of Plato’s Republic. However, in arguing that politics calls for duplicity, neither Plato nor Machiavelli was writing about democratic societies, and we might therefore wonder whether, in democratic societies, the problem of dirty hands should be differently understood.

The paper examines John Horton’s realist political theory, in particular his critique of John Rawls’s “high” or “liberal moralism”, and seeks to determine the extent to which, together with Horton, we would have reasons to leave Rawls’s and other Rawlsian accounts behind. The paper argues that some of the insights of Horton’s realism are mistaken, whereas many of those which are not mistaken are compatible with liberal moralism correctly understood. The argument is also formulated in terms of contingency, in particular in terms of a contrast between the realist emphasis on the contingency of human existence and the liberal moralism’s neglect or inability to properly account for it, due to a strong focus on necessity.