Mark Kingwell

Proponents and critics alike tend to adjudicate the ethics of sex segregation against the criterion of fairness. In general, fairness supports sex segregation so that women athletes can excel, but there is not yet consensus on who counts as a “woman.” Recent philosophical debates about sex segregation have unfolded as attempts to maximize the fairness of sports policies in light of concerns about biological categorization and social discrimination. We argue that fairness, while an important ideal, is an incomplete framework for organizing competitors and defers vexing questions about gender and justice. This is because, first, fairness can yield contradictory intuitions about the justice of sex-segregated competition; second, it can be overruled by more important values external to sport; third, it threatens to drain sport of its non-competitive virtues; and finally, it effectively masks unjust reasons for grouping athletes in particular ways.

This book is about a widely shared desire: the desire among citizens for a vibrant and effective social discourse of legitimation. It therefore begins with the conviction that what political philosophy can provide citizens is not further theories of the good life but instead directions for talking about how to justify the choices they make—or, in brief, "just talking." As part of the general trend away from the aridity of Kantian universalism in political philosophy, thinkers as diverse as Bruce Ackerman, Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty have taken a "dialogic turn" that seeks to understand the determination of principles of justice as a cooperative task, achieved in some kind of social dialogue among real citizens. In one way or another, however, each of these different variations on the dialogic model fail to provide fully satisfactory answers, Mark Kingwell shows. Drawing on their strengths, he presents another model he calls "justice as civility," which makes original use of the popular literature on etiquette and work in sociolinguistics to develop a more adequate theory of dialogic justice.

The Ethics of Architecture offers a short and approachable scholarly introduction to a timely question: in a world of increasing population density, how does one construct habitable spaces that promote social goals like health, happiness, environmental friendliness, and justice? What are the special ethical obligations assumed by architects? Because their work creates the basic material conditions that make all other human activity possible, architects and their associates in building enjoy vast influence on how all we live, work, play, worship, and think. With this influence comes tremendous, and not always examined, responsibility. This book addresses the range of ethical issues that architects face, with a broad understanding of ethics. Beyond strictly professional duties - transparency, technical competence, fair trading - lie more profound issues that move into aesthetic, political, and existential realms. Does an architect have a duty to create art, if not always beautiful art? Should an architect feel obliged to serve a community and not simply the client? Is social justice a possible orientation for architectural practice? Is there such a thing as feeling compelled to "shelter being" in architectural work? By taking these usually abstract questions into the region of physical creation, the book attempts a concrete reformulation of "architectural ethics" as a matter of deep reflection on the architect's role as both citizen and caretaker. Thinkers and makers discussed include Le Corbusier, Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Rem Koolhaas, Jane Jacobs, Arthur Danto, and John Rawls. An added preface addresses architectural issues arising during and after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you swipe left before considering the human being whose face you just summarily rejected? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? If so, this book is the philosophical lifeline you have been waiting for. Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Without moralizing, Mark Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms. Written in accessible language that references both classical philosophers and contemporary critics, Wish I Were Here turns to philosophy for a cure to the widespread unease that something is amiss in modern waking life.

Some recent philosophical examinations of the question "What is justice?"--a question at least as old as Plato--have made what might be called a dialogic turn. That is, instead of determining original choice options, bases of legal contract, or a calculus for summing preferences , these theories have sought to specify the conversational conditions under which any legitimate set of principles of justice must emerge. The approach offers the immediate advantage of understanding the determination of justice principles as cooperative task, a task achieved in, and only in, some kind of social dialogue among all members of a society. ;But what kind? In this dissertation I explore three theories that give divergent answers to this question: the constrained liberal dialogue defended by Bruce Ackerman, the model of traditions in translation outlined by Alasdair MacIntyre, and the revitalized rationalism of Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics. In my view, none of these theories constitutes the best possible answer to the question, "What is just talking?" MacIntyre's strong conservative critique of liberalism's universalist hopes is an effective reminder that trans-contextual norms are difficult to justify. But MacIntyre is himself guilty of employing a largely undefended notion of rationality to ground his picture of the conversation among traditions. At the same time, Habermas's radical attempt to complete the Enlightenment project of rationally grounding morality by way of a reconstruction of communicative competence is, though compelling in its own terms, ineffective in meeting the practical political problems that prompted the justice question in the first place. ;In pointing out shortcomings in these theories, I am concerned ultimately to isolate at least preliminary conditions for the best possible answer to the question "What is just talking?" In concluding the examination, then, I suggest a fourth model which seeks to combine the most effective aspects of each preceding model, and which I believe forges an effective weld between the wide rationalist hopes of procedural justice theory and the call for recovery of ethical context found in communitarian critics of that type of theory. This fourth model I call 'justice as politeness."

There are many strands in the thought of Charles Taylor, a gathering of philosophical interests diverse enough to embrace both political theory and philosophy of science, epistemology, and practical ethics, Nietzsche and Donald Davidson. If he has not succeeded in generating any supreme synthesis out of this diversity—if, indeed, he has sometimes finessed the material to fit a bigger picture, as in the controversial details of his grand intellectual history of modern consciousness, Sources of the Self—Taylor has nevertheless created, within his own work, a lively conversation, a dialogue at least as expressive and interesting as the one he has repeatedly advocated as the centre of any vibrant intellectual and political life. In Taylor’s philosophical works, plurality is met not with the fractured incommensurability now so often in vogue, but rather with a compelling, if necessarily endless, attempt at deep reconciliation.

This book is about a widely shared desire: the desire among citizens for a vibrant and effective social discourse of legitimation. It therefore begins with the conviction that what political philosophy can provide citizens is not further theories of the good life but instead directions for talking about how to justify the choices they make—or, in brief, "just talking." As part of the general trend away from the aridity of Kantian universalism in political philosophy, thinkers as diverse as Bruce Ackerman, Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty have taken a "dialogic turn" that seeks to understand the determination of principles of justice as a cooperative task, achieved in some kind of social dialogue among real citizens. In one way or another, however, each of these different variations on the dialogic model fail to provide fully satisfactory answers, Mark Kingwell shows. Drawing on their strengths, he presents another model he calls "justice as civility," which makes original use of the popular literature on etiquette and work in sociolinguistics to develop a more adequate theory of dialogic justice

Political-theoretic discussions of the public sphere, common at least since Habermas as a site of both crisis and justification, are rarely if ever animated by a sense of public spaces as what phenomenology calls 'real places.' Indeed, the space/place distinction is an important lever of critique for the transcendental rationalism operative in many political theories, even when unavowed. At the same time, architectural theory, even when itself informed by a laudable marriage of concrete and abstract, often seems uninterested in pursuing the political consequences of the built environment. This paper outlines the beginning steps in a large research project that might be labelled 'the political phenomenology of the city.'

Is democracy a gift economy—that is, one essentially distinct from, and opposed to, reduction to transactional exchanges such as those typical in a market economy? Beginning with a case study of success, this paper considers the role of scaleable effects in destabilizing the relationship between merit and reward. This opens up the question of how the general issue of “title” functions in larger systems of merit and reward, crucially including politics. Pursuing Jacques Rancière’s insights concerning hatred of democracy, we can begin to see the importance of “the drawing of lots” in mechanisms of political legitimation—the paradoxical “title which is no title,” which might just be the gift we democrats are looking for.