Edmund Handby

Analytic political theory often relies on intuitions. However, studies that use and critique intuitions are often silent on the underlying metaethical assumptions about intuitions. Metaethical theories from various strands of philosophy offer some insight into the assumptions that characterise our beliefs and intuitions. Some of the most prominent of these theories include moral realism, anti-realism, cultural relativism, and subjectivism. In this paper, I demonstrate how various approaches to the use of intuition rely on these assumptions in different ways. I also demonstrate how a lack of engagement with the relevant set of assumptions can be detrimental to analytic political theory and suggest that theorists should pay them greater attention. I conclude by suggesting that an understanding of the relevant metaethical commitments gives insight into the potential for critiques of intuition-use being either compatible or incompatible with one another.

A recent innovation in the study of methods in the history of ideas is the introduction of elements of semantic externalism from the philosophy of language. Studies that rely on semantic externalism have done so to address particular questions of method in political theorising, including the interpretation of ‘essentially contested concepts’, and the issue of relativism in historical contextualism. In this paper, I critically review the use of semantic externalism, and associated methods such as Kripke’s causal theory of reference, in the history of ideas. I explore the barriers that might prevent the use of externalism, and how studies relying on externalism seek to overcome such barriers. I then assess both the implications of relying on externalism, as well as a set of limitations.

A major puzzle in contemporary political theory is how to extend notions of justice to the environment. With environmental entities unable to communicate in ways that are traditionally recognised within the political sphere, their interests have largely been recognised instrumentally: only important as they contribute to human interests. In response to the multispecies justice project's call to reimagine our concepts of justice to include other-than-human beings and entities, we offer a novel reading of Edmund Burke's account of political representation that, we argue, can be applied to the environment. Burke claimed that interests are ‘unattached’ to any actual class or group, and that it is the duty of the representative to represent these unattached interests. Beyond providing an original application of Burke's work, the paper offers an alternative to the ‘allure’ of authoritarian environmentalism, an alternative which conservative thinkers may use as an entryway into debates on environmental justice.