Julian Culp

In this article I advance the inquiry of democratic citizenship in the digital age or ‘digital citizenship,’ for short, through an ideology critique of what I refer to as the ideology of digital empowerment. According to this ideology, which was prevalent from the early 1990s until the early 2010s, digital technologies would effectively contribute to democratic citizens’ political empowerment. Following the introduction, I explain the basic ideas I explain the basic ideas of such an ideology critique and distinguish between its empirical, genealogical, functional, and normative levels of analyses. Then, I identify Aristotelian, Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Kantian understandings of this ideology to show its past existence across a broad range of conceptions of democratic citizenship. Following that, I empirically analyse these understandings, showing for each of them that the reality of digital citizenship did not hold up to the ideology’s promise. Subsequently, I provide a genealogical analysis of how the ideology came into being by describing the crisis of democratic citizenship at the end of the 20th century, and I complement this analysis by identifying the belief management mechanisms that supported the ideology’s dissemination. In the penultimate section, I pursue a functional analysis of the cultural, psychological, and social conditions that explain why citizens kept endorsing the ideology despite it being erroneous. Finally, I conclude by sketching, from today’s perspective, a normative analysis that addresses the technological oligarchs’ damage to democratic citizenship which this ideology facilitated.

In the ideal vs. non-ideal theory debate contemporary political philosophers discuss the method of theorizing social justice. Some argue that theories of social justice should be ideal and justify exclusively in ideal theory a just society as goal for social reform. Others hold that theories of social justice should be nonideal and justify exclusively in non-ideal theory how to address social injustices in the status quo. This article shares the view of those who, like John Rawls, maintain that theories of justice must consist of an ideal and a non-ideal theory part. Yet it criticizes Rawls for prioritizing ideal over non-ideal theory and defends the mutual dependence or co-originality of ideal and non-theory. For not only does non-ideal theorizing depend on a goal of social reform justified in ideal theory. Ideal theorizing also depends on a non-ideal theory to determine whether and how the goal for social reform is feasible.

This article deciphers the apparent paradox of democratic citizenship in Western societies that are deeply affected by digital technologies. This paradox of digital citizenship, for short, consists in the fact that the contemporary literature suggests that digital technologies are both empowering and disempowering democratic citizenship. To decipher this paradox, the article provides a multi-perspectival analysis of digital citizenship, showing that depending on whether the focus is on agential or structural aspects, national or transnational scales, or ideal or nonideal approaches to democratic citizenship, one will deem digital technologies either empowering or disempowering. This result suggests that, by clearly identifying the perspective from which the relationship between digital technologies and democratic citizenship is analyzed, there is no paradox of digital citizenship.

Over the past two decades the academic literature on global distributive justice has generated a proliferation of positions regarding the question of how to conceive a globally just distribution of goods. One important development within this global justice debate is the emergence and increasing influence of several Pluralist theorists of global justice—including, perhaps most prominently, Fraser, R. Miller, and Risse. This article argues that Pluralists have not yet sufficiently engaged with the difficulty of how their conceptions of global justice could satisfy the publicity condition. This condition requires that the demands of justice must be publicly known to be recognized and fulfilled. This article explains why meeting this condition is especially difficult for the Pluralists. Then, it outlines an Integrated Pluralist position which, by placing special emphasis on global background justice, can meet the publicity condition. This position “integrates” concerns of justice emerging from a plurality of sites of justice. Thereby it follows “Integrationist” approaches to global justice—like those of Caney and Walton—which claim that the contents of justice of a given site of justice must not be determined in isolation from contents of other sites of justice.

This chapter provides an overview on the contemporary philosophical debate about equality of educational opportunity. It first develops a reconstruction of the major conceptions of equality of educational opportunity that contemporary educational philosophers and theorists have developed to flesh out the idea of educational equality of opportunity. These include, most importantly, liberal egalitarian or fairness based as well as socialist or luck-egalitarian conceptions of equality of educational opportunity. Second, the chapter lays out three influential critiques of equality of educational opportunity: the violation of parental liberty, the leveling down, and the misapplication of responsibility objections. On this basis, third, this chapter discusses alternative conceptions such as democratic educational adequacy or education as the development of social freedom that are meant to either complement or substitute equality of educational opportunity.

The practice-independent approach to theorizing justice (PIA) holds that the social practices to which a particular conception of justice is meant to apply are of no importance for the justification of such a conception. In this paper I argue that this approach to theorizing justice is incompatible with the method of reflective equilibrium (MRE) because the MRE is antithetical to a clean separation between issues of justification and application. In particular I will be maintaining that this incompatibility renders Simon Caney’s cosmopolitan theory of global justice inconsistent, because Caney claims to endorse both a humanity-centered PIA and the MRE.

On Will Kymlicka’s conception of multicultural citizenship, group membership enables personal autonomy by way of providing individuals with meaningful options. Many educational and political theorists have employed Kymlicka’s argument to defend a multicultural education as proper preparation for democratic citizenship in socially diverse liberal societies. Multicultural education includes the study of a variety of cultures and is meant to promote the development of a cultural identity, intercultural empathy and tolerance, and the cross-cultural construction of shared positions. Recently, however, Elizabeth Anderson has challenged multicultural citizenship and education on the grounds that they lead to the formation of group-specific biases, stereotypes, and inequalities in cultural and social capital. Therefore, she proposes an integrationist conception of citizenship education that requires citizens from different groups to collaborate within educational and public contexts. This article takes issue with the nationalist framing of this debate and Anderson’s integrationist conception because they neglect how large-scale social transformations like economic globalization and global governance have generated the need for transnationalizing democracy and democratic citizenship. Adopting a transnational perspective, this article ascribes an important role to multicultural education for learning the attitudes, knowledge, and skills that empower citizens to exercise democratic control both across and beyond national borders. The article emphasizes how the formation of intercultural empathy through multicultural education facilitates engagement in transnational social movements and political discourses. Finally, the article responds to objections concerning the lack of feasibility, cosmopolitan bias, and counterproductiveness of multicultural education and transnational democratic citizenship.

This article explores the contribution of Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory of morality, politics, and law to theorizing educational justice. First, it analyzes Christopher Martin’s discourse-ethical argument that the development of citizens’ discursive agency is required on epistemic grounds. The article criticizes this argument and claims that the moral importance of developing discursive agency should be justified instead on the basis of moral grounds. Second, the article examines Harvey Siegel’s critique of Habermas’ moral epistemology and suggests that Siegel neglects that the epistemic justification of moral claims proceeds differently from the epistemic justification of assertoric claims. Finally, the article presents a discourse-theoretic conception of educational justice that defends the importance of discursively justifying norms of educational justice through properly arranged structures of justification.

Philosophical debates about educational justice concern the justification, the contents, and the realization of rights to education, and they take place at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education. On the one hand, theorists of educational justice turn to conceptions of justice within political philosophy and use them as normative foundations when developing their conceptions of educational justice. On the other hand, they draw on conceptions of moral and political education within philosophy of education to show how persons would eventually adopt and develop attitudes, knowledge, and skills that are needed to build and maintain a just social and political order. Due to this close interlacement between political philosophy and philosophy of education, it is apt to use the label political philosophy of education or philosophy of political education to characterize this distinctive field of philosophical research. Despite this interlacement, however, the intense and wide-ranging debates on global justice within contemporary political philosophy have hardly influenced the current debates on educational justice. The aim of this article is to transcend the national framing of the current discussion on educational justice by presenting a democratic conception of global educational justice.

Shmuel Nili’s Philosophizing The Indefensible – Strategic Political Theory represents a sophisticated response to the widespread support of political positions that seem unreasonable from the perspective of liberal political morality. Nili takes seriously extreme right-wing, pro-life, pro-business, and climate change-sceptic positions that other liberal theorists seem to prefer sweeping under the carpet when turning towards yet another puzzle of liberalism. This is a refreshing move, which Nili pursues masterfully through the critical analysis of such seemingly indefensible positions in painstaking detail. That said, readers who are intrigued by the political philosophical methods of Charles Larmore and the late John Rawls, who accept the fact of reasonable moral disagreement and focus primarily on the question of political legitimacy, may sometimes find that Nili’s argumentations are somewhat moralistic.

This chapter develops and discusses a Deweyan perspective on the contemporary difficulties of deliberation within the highly fragmented digitized public spheres of liberal democracies. A high level of fragmentation is a key feature of digitized public spheres, as digital technologies like computers, the internet, and social media platforms facilitate the creation of political content, the circumvention of traditional gatekeepers like journalists, and the personalization of access to political debates. As a result, democratic theorists are concerned that the digitized public spheres are insufficiently inclusive for identifying public opinions that are generally. The Deweyan perspective developed in this chapter adds new insights into the existing analyses of political deliberation by emphasizing the importance of a well- functioning democracy for citizens’ lifelong education, as well as by highlighting the impact of cultural transformations on liberal democracy. However, despite the valuable insights that can be generated by the Deweyan perspective, this article also criticizes it for failing to deal adequately with the unavoidable pluralism of reasonable understandings of the good life in a liberal democracy. The chapter therefore also seeks to evaluate to what extent, if at all, the Deweyan insights can be taken up as well by a political liberal perspective that seeks to accommodate this pluralism.

This essay revisits the metanormative version of the motivational critique of contemporary conceptions of cosmopolitan justice. I distinguish two ways of understanding this critique as leveling the charge of infeasibility against cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan motivation can be understood to be infeasible because it is impossible or because it is not reasonably likely to be achieved if tried. The possibilistic understanding is not persuasive, given that examples show that cosmopolitan motivation is possible. The conditional probabilistic understanding is more compelling, by contrast, because under certain social conditions it may not be reasonably likely that cosmopolitan motivation is achieved if tried. I argue, however, that whether cosmopolitan motivation is infeasible in the conditional probabilistic sense depends on malleable social conditions, given that, according to a plastic account of the human moral mind developed by Allen Buchanan, social conditions can undermine or favor the formation of cosmopolitan motivation. I illustrate this plastic account by showing how it can explain recent anticosmopolitan orientations as “tribalistic” reflexes to global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved competition for survival resources and (existential) threats. I conclude that cosmopolitan motivation is not infeasible under all social conditions and that cosmopolitanism therefore requires bringing about and maintaining those social conditions under which cosmopolitan motivation is feasible.

It has often been noted that liberal democracies are facing a serious political crisis. A common reaction to this situation is to call for more comprehensive or more effective liberal democratic education. This volume discusses some of the most important challenges to and critiques of the paradigm of liberal democratic education. In doing so, it offers novel insights into how liberal democratic education can be amended, extended or qualified to address the special challenges of the current political moment.

In this article Julian Culp offers a new conceptualization of democratic citizenship education in light of the transformations of contemporary Western societies to which the use of digital technologies has contributed. His conceptualization adopts a deliberative understanding of democracy that provides a systemic perspective on society-wide communicative arrangements and employs a nonideal, critical methodology that concentrates on overcoming democratic deficits. Based on this systemic, deliberative conception of democracy, Culp provides an analysis of the public sphere's normative deficits and argues that current political communication may be systemically distorted. Drawing on this analysis, he suggests that practices of democratic citizenship education in digitized societies must not concentrate narrowly on the effective and responsible use of digital technologies. Instead, these practices should also focus on the economic and cultural conditions that are co-responsible for the structural problems of political communication as well as address the democratic deficits that are reflected in inadequate communicative arrangements.

Die Staatsform einer konstitutionellen Demokratie ist von zentraler Bedeutung für John Rawls’ Gerechtigkeitstheorie. Sie stellt das grundlegendste, rechtlich verfasste Institutionensystem einer Gesellschaft dar, welches Bürger*innen gleiche Grundfreiheiten ermöglichen soll, einschließlich der hierfür erforderlichen kulturellen, ökonomischen und sozialen Voraussetzungen. Diese Form der Demokratie soll die wichtigsten institutionellen Anforderungen Rawls’ liberal-egalitärer Auffassung binnenstaatlicher Gerechtigkeit verwirklichen.

Thomas Pogge absolvierte ein Ph.D.-Programm in Philosophie an der Harvard University und wurde dort von John Rawls betreut. Seine Dissertation argumentierte für die Extension Rawls’ Gerechtigkeitstheorie auf globale Verhältnisse. Pogges globale Gerechtigkeitstheorie betrachtet weltweite sozioökonomische Armut als strukturelles Problem für das insbesondere reiche Länder und deren Regierungen verantwortlich sind. In der Ausarbeitung seiner eigenen, politisch-liberalen Theorie internationaler Gerechtigkeit kritisierte Rawls Pogges Auffassung globaler Gerechtigkeit. Pogge wiederum hat in methodologischen Debatten Rawls’ politische Philosophie für deren Fokus auf die Grundstruktur und Grundgüter verteidigt.

This paper will argue that there are good reasons to uphold certain forms of the practice among states to give and receive “official development assistance” (ODA). These reasons are grounded in a discourse-theoretic, internationalist account of global justice and represent a novel moral rationale for certain forms of this practice – the “International Development Practice”, for short. This discourse-theoretic, internationalist account agrees with theorists of global distributive justice – like Charles Beitz and David Miller – that the continuation of certain forms of the International Development Practice is a demand of justice, rather than solely a demand of humanity. Yet it also rejects their view that the moral rationale for a certain form of the International Development Practice is to further realize an ideal of global distributive justice. Instead, the moral rationale for a certain form of the International Development Practice is that this practice can contribute to establish the social and political structures that are necessary to enable people to engage in justificatory practices that are constitutive for the construction of principles of global justice.

This article will show that the work of international development organizations requires a constant reflection of the moral and political philosophical kind. A major reason for this is that while people agree that the abstract concept of development, in its normative usage, indeed, simply means social progress or good, or desirable, social change, they disagree profoundly about what social progress consists in exactly. There exists a normative disagreement about the conception of development that expresses best how social progress ought to be defined in concrete terms. For example, should we really think of social progress only in terms of economic growth, i.e. in the accumulation of goods and services? Or should we instead, for example, think of it in terms of the eradication of extreme poverty? Or in terms of yet something else, like the expansion of options for human choice?

ABSTRACT The central aim of Peter Hägel’s Billionaires in World Politics (BWP) is to challenge the assumption that private individuals lack agency and power in world politics – an assumption that is widely shared in the field of International Relations (IR). Hägel’s methodological strategy to achieve this aim is twofold. First, he concentrates on minutest biographical aspects of billionaires to lay bare the idiosyncrasy of their choices, and to falsify, thus, structuralist assumptions of how individual agency is undermined by factors such as class, roles, or fields. Second, Hägel engages in counter-factual reasoning to support the claim that these individual decisions end up having a real impact on public affairs abroad. This impact is difficult to overestimate given that, as Hägel reveals, billionaires have affected a whole array of political issues, including Brexit, climate change policy, democratic development in Eastern Europe, global health policy, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and the war in Iraq. This introduction starts off by elaborating on the central scholarly contribution of BWP. Following that, this introduction explains why the insights that BWP provides suggest that we do not live in a neo-feudal order, despite the immense global economic inequality which billionaires’ wealth manifests.

What kind of education is needed for democracy? How can education respond to the challenges that current democracies face? This unprecedented Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the most important ideas, issues, and thinkers within democratic education. Its thirty chapters are written by leading experts in the field in an accessible format. Its breadth of purpose and depth of analysis will appeal to both researchers and practitioners in education and politics. The Handbook addresses not only the historical roots and philosophical foundations of democratic education, but also engages with contemporary political issues and key challenges to the project of democratic education.

John Rawls wurde 1921 in Baltimore im Bundesstaat Maryland als zweiter von fünf Söhnen geboren. Nach dem Besuch einer privaten und einer öffentlichen Schule in Baltimore wechselte Rawls an die religiöse Kent School im Bundesstaat Connecticut. Wie sein älterer Bruder Bill studierte Rawls in Princeton, wo er 1943 sein Studium mit einem Bachelor of Arts abschloss. In seiner Senior Thesis Über Sünde, Glaube und Religion beschäftigte sich der zu dieser Zeit streng religiöse Rawls mit dem Problem des Bösen, auf das er durch Veranstaltungen von Norman Malcom gebracht wurde.

Martha Craven Nussbaum ist in New York City geboren und wuchs in einer gut situierten, protestantischen Familie in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, auf. Sie begann 1964 ihr Studium am Wellesley College in Massachusetts, zog allerdings 1966 nach New York City, wo sie zunächst eine Stelle in einem Repertoiretheater annahm. Noch im gleichen Jahr setzte sie ihr Studium an der New York University an der dortigen School of the Arts für ein Jahr im Fach Theater fort, bevor sie nach zwei weiteren Studienjahren an der NYU einen Bachelor of Arts mit dem Hauptfach Altphilologie erwarb. 1969 konvertierte sie zum Judentum und heiratete Alan Nussbaum.

Rising powers are fundamentally shifting the relations of power in the global economic and political landscape. International political theory, however, has so far failed to evaluate this nascent multipolarity. This article fills this lacuna by synthesizing empirical and normative modes of inquiry. It examines the transformation of sovereignty exercised by emerging democracies and focuses especially on the case of Brazil. The paper shows that – in stark contrast to emerging democracies’ foreign policy rhetoric – the ‘softening’ of sovereignty, which means that emerging powers gain as well as lose certain aspects of sovereignty, has become the norm. The paper explores this softening of sovereignty from the perspective of global justice by assessing it on the basis of globalist, statist, and internationalist conceptions of global justice. We find that the emergent multipolarity contributes in various ways to the realization of the distinct socioeconomic and political criteria of these three conceptions of global justice. However, we also point out that the transformation of sovereignty generates particular problems for the realization of all three conceptions.

When asking fundamental questions about education, philosophers have not shied away from giving radical answers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, who found himself disenchanted with the artificiality and pride that he encountered in 18th century Paris, advocated a laissez faire education in the countryside. Such an “education by nature,” Rousseau thought, would keep children at bay from morally corrupt society and would allow them to become authentic and sincere persons. Similarly concerned with moral education, in the early 20th century the American pragmatist John Dewey argued that experiential learning in socially diverse settings would be crucial for nourishing democratic culture. Being a pragmatist, Dewey also maintained that educational philosophy should always concentrate on solving practical difficulties of contemporary social life, instead of dealing with idle intellectual puzzles. In this spirit, oriented towards educational practice, several philosophers of education and educational theorists have recently turned their attention to the ways in which education might help solving some of the pressing problems arising from globalization. This special issue of Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric assembles the latest scholarship of some these philosophers and theorists on the topic of “Global Justice and Education” – a topic which until recently has been curiously neglected within the academic literature on global justice. Alejandra Boni (Technical University of Valencia) and Diana Carolina Velasco (University of Ibagué) analyze how power asymmetries in global knowledge production can give rise to epistemic injustices and explored how academics can collaborate with civil society actors to fight such injustices. Johannes Drerup (Technical University of Dortmund and Free University Amsterdam) responds to the postcolonial critique that global citizenship education is Western-centric by arguing that the dichotomy of “the West vs. the Rest” is outdated and that the critical study of colonialism should be part of global citizenship education. Juan Espíndola (National Autonomous University of Mexico) criticizes that low fee private schools in many developing countries often times do not provide an adequate education, and that global philanthropists should therefore be more careful in their support for these schools. Lindsey Schwartz (University of Wisconsin-Madison) discusses a number of problems that students living abroad face because two central principles of educational justice that are usually taken for granted at the national level either systematically overlook or exacerbate their problems. These two principles are the principle of educational adequacy and the presumption of responsibility on the part of a host country for meeting children’s educational needs. Due to their inappropriateness under conditions of globalization and, in particular, transnational migration, Schwartz demands a cosmopolitan revision of the first and a replacement for the second with a focus on collective responsibility. Finally, Danielle Zwarthoed (Catholic University of Louvain) critically examines the proposal that education for autonomy could be conceived of as a global educational aim, and points out that not only do non-Western cultures endorse the ideal of autonomy, but also that autonomy increasingly gains practical value in a world in which mobility is ubiquitous. All paper drafts except that of Lindsey Schwartz have been subject to intensive debate during the two-day international workshop on “Global Justice In and Through Education,” held at the American University of Paris (AUP) on November 29 and 30, 2018. The international workshop was hosted by the Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS) and was generously funded not only from the CCDS but also from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Philosophical conceptions of educational justice are centered at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education. They justify moral‐political rights to education and sometimes also determine who is responsible for their realization through which kinds of pedagogical practices or systemic educational reform. This article concentrates on contemporary conceptions of educational justice in primary and secondary education and highlights central practical implications that the various conceptions of educational justice have under non‐ideal circumstances. Section 2 explains the conceptions of fair and luck‐egalitarian equal educational opportunity, Section 3 the conception of educational priority for the least‐advantaged students, and Section 4 the conception of democratically adequate education. Finally, Section 5 presents a philosophical conception of global justice in school education. Section 6 concludes.

In Democratic Education in a Globalized World (Routledge, 2019) I defend a discourse theory of global justice as the appropriate normative1 ground for conceiving educational justice and citizenship education under conditions of economic and political globalization. In addition, I articulate democratic conceptions of global educational justice and citizenship education that recognize a moral-political right to democratically adequate education and call for the creation of transnational democratic consciousness. Based on these conceptions I spell out school practices such as historically informed, cross-cultural learning within socially diverse settings that would contribute to realizing these conceptions. In this article I reply to liberal perfectionist, communitarian-conservative and empiricist-historical critiques of Democratic Education in a Globalized World from Michael Festl, Martin Beckstein and Michael Geiss, respectively. I emphasize the feasibility of injustice-reducing educational practices, I explain how a discourse theory of justice accommodates considerations of both the good and the right, and I justify why the grim record of past educational experience does not render pointless the pursuit of progressive aims through education.