Gregory Robson

Some departures from political tradition have been vindicated as historic advances: the rise of democracy and the abolition of slavery, for instance. Others have led to death, destruction, and despair: Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for instance. Should citizens and political leaders follow or deviate from tradition? Deviation’s mixed record makes it hard to say. But the welfare of countless persons depends on the answer. I shall defend two interlocking theses about the value of political traditions (henceforth sometimes just “traditions”) that any adequate argument for deviation must consider. After preliminaries in section I, section II defends the thesis that traditions enable citizens and civic groups to forge meaningful links between a society’s past, present, and future. This argument extends some of Samuel Scheffler’s recent work on traditions generally to the case of political traditions in particular. In section III, I defend the thesis that traditions interpret abstract principles of political morality, rendering them determinate enough to be realized in particular, diverse societies. I develop a model of how this process works, building on and proposing revisions to a fascinating recent argument by Steven Wall. The last section addresses possible worries about whether members of political societies with settled traditions really are self-determining. Overall, we will see that political traditions are valuable largely because of the temporal meaning they provide for citizens and how they render abstract principles of morality determinate enough for citizens to realize in practice.

Members of modern, digital societies experience a tremendous number and diversity of stimuli from sources such as computers, televisions, other electronic media, and various forms of advertising. In this paper, I argue that the presence of a wide range of stimulating items in modern societies poses a special risk to the welfare of members of modern societies. By considering the set of modern stimuli in a more comprehensive way than normative theorists have done so far—as part of a complex system with which members of modern societies cannot reasonably avoid interacting—we can see why the perceptual and informational spaces in which modern life occurs can be sources of disvalue for members of modern societies. This seems true even though the technological innovations that produce these stimuli add great value to the lives of members of modern societies.

In “Punishment as a Costly Signal of Reform,” Jim Staihar argues that prisons should provide inmates with opportunities to sacrifice in ways that signal their genuine reform to others. I first show why Staihar’s program would be valuable, but only in restricted contexts. I then argue that costly signaling programs will usually be either not sufficiently costly to be taken seriously by the signal’s receivers or not rational for inmates in harsh prison environments to complete. Next, I consider the worry that some inmates will choose to participate in costly signaling programs as mimics, rendering ineffective the signals of truly reformed inmates. What Staihar must say, but does not, is why the non-mimicker’s expected utility gain will be sufficiently higher than the mimicker’s such that only sincere participation is incentivized. I conclude by showing why Staihar’s proposal could nevertheless be a valuable part of a hybrid program of legal punishment.

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 132 - 148 A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most worth considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted.