Elaine Lok-Lam Yim

Should political theorists engage in ethnographic fieldwork? This paper offers a new argument in favor of adopting an ethnographic sensibility: it helps ‘democratize’ political theory in two ways. First, ethnographic sensibility enables theorists to demonstrate democratic respect for individuals or communities by incorporating their voices and practices into theory. Political theory has been criticized for insufficient attentiveness to real-life politics; part of this problem is relational. Theories about how different agents (e.g., government officials, activists) should act are often developed without attending to those agents’ lived experiences and practices. Ethnographic sensibility helps address this concern through the use of thick description. Second, by rendering the perspectives of, and challenges faced by, different agents intelligible to others, ethnographically informed political theory may help promote mutual understanding among citizens; perspective-taking is important for democracy whether or not one agrees with the perspectives being considered.

Lenman 's cluelessness objection against consequentialism states that we are almost entirely clueless to the actual consequences of our action. In ‘Cluelessness,’ Hilary Greaves distinguishes between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ cases of cluelessness and argues that the principle of indifference applies to ‘simple’ cases, thereby rescuing the ‘simple’ cases from the cluelessness objection. In this discussion note, I argue that Greaves's distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ cases fails and cluelessness is more problematic than Greaves believes.

The belief that all human beings are ‘moral equals’ is widespread within the canon of Western liberal philosophy. However, it is unclear precisely what ‘moral equality’ or its associate terms mean, what grounds our ‘moral equality’ and what the implications of being ‘moral equals’ are. In this paper, I distinguish between three ways of understanding ‘moral equality’: the ‘buck-passing’, ‘explanatory’ and ‘reverse-explanatory’ accounts. The buck-passing account of moral equality is in parallel with Scanlon’s buck-passing account of value. It holds that ‘moral equality’ is not a metaphysically fundamental concept and simply amounts to having other properties shared equally by all human beings that constitute the reasons for why we ought to treat all human beings equally in certain respects. The explanatory account understands the concept of ‘moral equality’ as metaphysically fundamental and explanatory of why human beings who are the same in certain respects have the same entitlement to x. The reverse-explanatory account also sees ‘moral equality’ as metaphysically fundamental but holds that the explanatory relationship goes the other way round: moral equality is explained by how we ought to act. I argue that the buck-passing account is a more accurate way of understanding moral equality.