Matt S. Whitt

In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, students sometimes use “distancing strategies” to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially José Medina’s account of “active ignorance.” In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work.

When philosophers and political theorists turn their attention to migration, they often prioritize general normative commitments, giving only secondary concern to whether these commitments are reflected in policy. As a result, pressing issues affecting the status, rights, and life-chances of immigrants can get lost in abstract debates over the right of states to exclude individuals, or the rights of individuals to associate with whomever they like. Joseph Carens’s new book, The Ethics of Immigration, inverts this tendency by focusing first on existing immigration control practices, examining their normative justifications, and then pushing them in the direction of justice

Political theorists have long criticized policies that deny voting rights to convicted felons. However, some have recently turned to democratic theory to defend this practice, arguing that democratic self-determination justifies, or even requires, disenfranchising felons. I review these new arguments, acknowledge their force against existing criticism, and then offer a new critique of disenfranchisement that engages them on their own terms. Using democratic theory’s “all-subjected principle,” I argue that liberal democracies undermine their own legitimacy when they deny the vote to felons and prisoners. I then show how this argument overcomes obstacles that cause problems for other critiques of disenfranchisement.

This article reinterprets Hegel’s much discussed “failure” to theorize a remedy for the poverty that disrupts modern society. I argue that Hegel does not offer any solution to the problem of poverty because, in his view, the sovereign state depends upon the persistence of poverty. Whereas a state’s achievement of external sovereignty requires the presence of another state, its achievement of internal sovereignty requires the presence of a different, internal other. This role is played by the impoverished and rebellious “rabble,” which opposes the state’s unity and stability. Ethical life cannot eliminate poverty because poverty, and the insecurity that it engenders, are dialectical conditions of the state’s highest development. This interpretation reveals a critical dimension to Hegel’s political philosophy, insofar as the state’s promise of actualized freedom can only be sustained in relation to a mass of internal “outsiders” to whom that freedom does not extend