Frodo Podschwadek

This chapter has a closer look at the role of autonomy in political liberalism and what implication a requirement for citizens’ autonomy has for political liberal education. Political liberalism rejects any reliance on substantive conceptions of autonomy which are connected to comprehensive ethical views that are not necessarily shared by all reasonable citizens. Instead, political liberalism insists on so-called political autonomy of individuals which pertains only to their roles as citizens. The just state is not supposed to be concerned with peoples’ autonomy beyond this requirement, according to Rawls. However, from a perspective of education it appears hard to make sense of a concept of political autonomy without having first a concept of personal autonomy. Therefore, this chapter argues, the political liberal state must care about the development of citizens’ individual autonomy as well. Yet this does not mean that political liberalism needs to endorse a substantive notion of autonomy, as the concept of individual autonomy that can serve as a precursor for political autonomy is only a weak one without deeper connections to any substantive ethical views.

This chapter examines the conception of political virtues, a central element of political liberalism, and the relation between political virtues and the education of future citizens. The development of political and civic virtues is seen as an important step in becoming a citizen in many liberal theories, and a political liberal approach to education should be no exception. Yet, Rawls’ own account, established in A Theory of Justice and still supposed to hold after his political turn, collides with the political liberal aim not to justify political decisions on comprehensive views, including decision about civic education. For Rawls, political virtues are connected to the so-called Aristotelian Principle, an idea that can be plausibly interpreted as such a comprehensive view. To provide political liberal education with the required legitimacy, this chapter suggests replacing the Aristotelian Principle with a Humean account of virtues which remains agnostic about the underlying mechanisms that motivate virtuous behaviour in citizens. The chapter further analyses permissible teaching strategies in political virtues education and assesses justifications of indirect ways of virtue education, such as nudging and moral bio-enhancement.

Immigration does not belong to the topics that are usually discussed in the context of political liberalism, not least due to its focus on justice and reasonable pluralism in one particular political community, which is often modelled as a closed society. Nevertheless, immigration happens in contemporary liberal democracies, and with it comes the task of integrating the children of immigrants. Political liberalism should therefore be able to provide normative guidelines for the treatment of immigrant children too. This chapter argues that despite Rawls’ neglect of immigration in his political liberal theory, and the liberal nationalist position he expresses in his late theory of international relations, political liberalism ought to say something about the integration of immigrants into a just society. It then outlines requirements of integration of immigrant children in schools, based on theories of integration by authors like Elizabeth Anderson, but also discusses contrary positions, as have been developed, e.g., by Michael Merry, who argues in favour of separation in education under non-ideal circumstances.

This chapter outlines the main goal of this book, to develop a political liberal account of education, and explains the background on which it attempts to achieve it. For readers who are not too familiar with political liberalism, this chapter introduces central terminology from political liberal theory that will be important for developing a political liberal account of education. It provides an outline of the central questions such an account should be able to answer, as well as an argument what advantages a political liberal account of education has over a perfectionist liberal one. This project can be understood as an exercise in public reason aimed at determining the proper normative guidelines for public education. It is also an attempt to bridge the gap between ideal and non-ideal political philosophy by demonstrating how principles from deliberation about idealised societies can provide guidelines with application value for politics in real societies.

This chapter illuminates the role of citizens’ rights in political liberal theory and how a clearly defined concept of rights can help to clarify authority relations over children’s education. While Rawls refers to rights repeatedly in his political theory, the underlying conception of rights he has in mind remains fuzzy and is therefore not very helpful to resolve conflicts of authority between parents and the state over the education of children. Therefore, a Hohfeldian perspective of rights and liberties is applied to make rights and liberties of children, parents, and the political liberal state more transparent. This strategy not only allows to identify the actors who have authority to make decisions on particular educational questions but also to find a middle ground between positions that either propose radical neutrality in the upbringing of children, as found in the work of Matthew Clayton, or criticise political liberalism to be too focused on neutrality to effectively protect children from the influence of harmful comprehensive views, as, e.g., Tim Fowler argues.

This chapter looks at the topic of same-sex relations in political liberal education. After engaging with questions of religious freedom withing the limits of political liberalism, it appears that even if reasonable religious views would support educational institutions that are regulated by the state, religious objections against certain contents of school curricula are still possible. Especially same-sex relations appear to be a point of concern for some religious views and have been targeted by various proponents of natural law theory, John Finnis being one of the most prominent among them. After assessing a variety of arguments against what is often called the promotion of same-sex relations in sex education, this chapter argues that political liberal education ought to include this topic in sex education curricula on grounds of equality and citizens’ self-respect, drawing on the works of feminist authors like Elizabeth Brake and Clare Chambers to support its argument.

This chapter provides an analysis of the aspects of John Rawls’ political philosophy that are relevant for questions of education. It starts with giving an overview of the sparse occasions where Rawls himself writes about the relevance of these concepts for liberal education and then discusses the three major claims about education that can be found there: the idea of political liberal minimal civic education and its aims, the development of a sense of justice as political virtue, and education as a political institution to which the requirements of public reason apply.

This chapter applies the results of Part I of this book to the question how much freedom there must be for religious world views in political liberal education. The role of public reason is particularly important in this context, as many political liberals appear to have a tendency to dismiss religious concerns about the effects of certain types of public education as based on comprehensive reasons and therefore not suitable for justificatory arguments about the design of educational institutions. Some public reason liberals, notably Kevin Vallier, have in contrast argued that public reason liberalism, properly understood, would not provide justifications of any sort of tax-funded public education at all and result in a fully privatised educational system. This chapters attempts to outline a political liberal position that acknowledges on the one hand the concerns of religious parents and attempts to accommodate them as much as possible, while on the other hand taking seriously the commitments to egalitarian justice and social coherence that are part of the political liberal project.

In this paper, we argue that boredom can be an important experience that contributes to personal autonomous agency by providing authentic motivation, and that strategies of social media providers to bind users’ attention to their platforms undermine this authenticity. As discussed in social epistemology and media ethics for a while now, such strategies can lead to so-called epistemic or filter bubbles. Our analysis of the relation between boredom and social media use focuses on a similarly impairing effect of social media on users’ autonomy, which we call authenticity bubbles.

Dieses Buch bietet die erste ausgearbeitete Darstellung politisch-liberaler Bildung und verbindet eine gründliche Analyse der theoretischen Grundlagen mit anwendungsorientierten Ansätzen für zeitgenössische pädagogische Herausforderungen. Neben einer eingehenden Auseinandersetzung mit den Unzulänglichkeiten der Rawls'schen Theorie und der Erörterung einiger zentraler Einwände gegen neutralitätsbasierte Beschränkungen in der Bildung bietet der Band eine aufschlussreiche Diskussion von Themen wie gleichgeschlechtliche Beziehungen in der Sexualerziehung, die Stellung von Kindern mit Migrationshintergrund und das Recht religiöser Eltern, die Erziehung ihrer Kinder zu bestimmen. Das Buch skizziert ein politisch-liberales Bildungsverständnis, das einen nützlichen Beitrag zu den aktuellen Debatten über Liberalismus und Bildung leistet, wie er in der bisherigen Literatur zum politischen Liberalismus nicht zu finden ist. Es ist von Interesse für alle, die an der Schnittstelle von politischer Philosophie und Bildungsphilosophie arbeiten, sowie für Wissenschaftler, die ein breiteres Interesse daran haben, wie der Liberalismus auf die Herausforderungen des Wertepluralismus reagieren kann.

Migration und Armut sind eng miteinander verbunden. Für die meisten Migrant*innen ist Armut der Grund, ihre Heimat zu verlassen, um anderswo ein günstigeres wirtschaftliches Umfeld zu finden. Der Internationalen Organisation für Migration zufolge lag die Zahl der sogenannten Arbeitsmigrant*innen im Jahr 2015 weltweit bei 150,3 Millionen, bei einer Gesamtzahl von 247,6 Millionen Migrant* innen. Diese Zahlen erfassen Migrant* innen mit offizieller Arbeitserlaubnis und es ist anzunehmen, dass die Zahl von Arbeitsmigrant*innen ohne legale Dokumente deutlich höher ist.

Offering the first developed account of political liberal education, this book combines a thorough analysis of the theoretical groundwork of political liberal education with application-oriented approaches to contemporary educational challenges. Following in depth engagement with the shortcomings of Rawls’ theory and addressing some key objections to neutrality-based restrictions in education, the volume moves on to provide an insightful discussion of topics such as same-sex relations in sex-education, the position of migrant children and the rights of religious parents to determine the education of their children. This book outlines a political liberal account of education which provides a useful contribution to the current debates about liberalism and education in a way unprecedented in the literature on political liberalism so far. It is of interest to anyone working at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education as well as for scholars with a broader interest in how liberalism can respond to the challenges of value pluralism.

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards.

This paper offers an analysis of the relation between political populism and mass media, and how this relation becomes problematic for democratic societies. It focuses on the fact that mass media, due to their purpose and infrastructure, can unintentionally reinforce populist messages. Research findings from communication science and political psychology are used to illustrate how, for example, a combination of mass media agenda setting and motivated reasoning can influence citizens’ political decisions and impair their political autonomy. This poses a particular normative challenge for modern democracies: how to counter these populism-supporting effects within the constraints of democratic legitimacy? After showing how severely limited legal measures to curb populist media effects would be, the paper argues in favour of media competence education as a way of providing future citizens with an epistemic toolkit to navigate the media environment and strengthen their political autonomy.