Michael Buckley

This book defends constructivism as a leading approach to formulating the moral basis of political authority. It addresses a central tension in constructivist theory: how principles can be both dependent on human deliberation and normatively objective. Moving beyond the familiar Rawlsian model, Political Authority develops a constructivist framework for normative political analysis that is accommodating of pluralism, sensitive to context, attuned to moral reasoning, and continuous with a long history of political thought about the nature of moral truth and legitimacy in politics. Engaging with traditional themes of authority, power, and justice, as well as contemporary debates on political realism, public justification, and performance legitimacy, this book is of interest to scholars and graduate students in political philosophy, political theory, normative ethics, democratic theory, and human rights studies.

Political liberals have recently applied public justification to democratic backsliding cases. These applications explain how ideas internal to political liberalism can help contain and reverse backsliding. This paper expands this work to cross-border challenges linked to partisan shifts within a domestic electorate. It defends two claims. First, there are good reasons to extend public justification to backsliding cases. Second, recent applications of public justification do not successfully extend to cross-border challenges. The paper’s conclusion suggests how one might best carry out the extension.

Alexei Marcoux has argued that business ethics should focus less on organizational form and more on business practice. He suggests that a definition of ‘business’ as “a(n intentionally) self-sustaining, transactionseeking and transaction-executing practice” can help facilitate this shift by attuning researchers to the essential activity of business. I argue that this definition has troubling implications for a practice-based approach to business ethics, and that anyone advocating such an approach would be better served by treating ‘business’ as a cluster concept.

Do pharmaceutical companies have a moral obligation to expand access to investigational drugs to patients outside the clinical trial? One reason for thinking they do not is that expanded access programs might negatively affect the clinical trial process. This potential impact creates dilemmas for practitioners who nevertheless acknowledge some moral reason for expanding access. Bioethicists have explained these reasons in terms of beneficence, compassion, or a principle of rescue, but their arguments have been limited to questions of moral permissibility, leaving for future research the question of whether expanded access is morally obligatory. We take up this further question and argue that pharmaceutical companies have a moral obligation to expand access. Our defense is not based on beneficence, compassion, or rescue, but instead on a reciprocal moral expectation resulting from existing social commitments that help ensure a robust pharmaceutical practice within the broader healthcare system. Our aim is to give this obligation, along with several others, a coherent and plausible structure within the wider clinical trial process so that one might better explain the sources of the dilemmas and their possible resolutions.

This chapter defends John Stuart Mill’s idea of the “stationary state” as a normatively compelling alternative to growth-centered political economy. I argue that Mill’s position follows from his claim that the utilitarian calculus must measure not only the quantity but also the quality of pleasure. Higher pleasures, such as intellectual, aesthetic, and moral utilities, are often crowded out by economies organized around perpetual growth and profit maximization. From this perspective, laissez-faire markets are not reliable maximizers of utility, since they tend to privilege lower, consumption-driven pleasures. By contrast, a stationary economy focused on maintaining capital stocks, limiting resource depletion, and loosening the imperative of constant productivity creates the conditions for more humane and socially oriented forms of life. I further situate Mill’s view within contemporary conditions of demographic decline and technological maturity. In the absence of a normative framework, such conditions risk diminishing overall welfare. Revisiting Mill’s humanistic ethic provides a moral roadmap, internal to the liberal tradition, for rethinking the purpose of economic institutions and for orienting policy beyond growth.

In this article the author develops the view, held by some, that political constructivism is best interpreted as a pragmatic enterprise aiming to solve political problems. He argues that this interpretation's structure of justification is best conceived in terms of two separate investigations—one develops a normative solution to a particular political problem by working up into a coherent whole certain moral conceptions of persons and society; and the other is an empirically based analysis of the political problem. The author argues that the empirically based analysis can generate criteria for assessing whether the normative theory successfully works out a solution, thereby developing a functionalist structure of justification. He further argues that this interpretation overcomes a longstanding criticism of constructivism, namely, that the use of substantive moral concepts in the hypothetical choice procedure biases the defense of principles in a particular direction and therefore begs important philosophical questions.

Technological advances in media communications have raised questions about the appropriateness of media ownership rules for traditional TV and radio broadcast. This article contributes to this debate by defending a set of principles that ought to govern the distribution of broadcast spectrum. In particular, it defends principles reflecting the ‹public interest’ constraint currently informing broadcast media ownership rules, and argues against a free-market procedure for distributing spectrum use. The argument relies upon the application of a political constructivist approach typical to many political theories. In applying this approach, the author illustrates the strengths and weakness of constructivism and in the process provide an example for how constructivism can be applied to other subjects. As a result, the article has two aims. First, it defends a set of broadcast ownership principles. Second, it provides a model for how philosophers might apply constructivism to other subjects.

Moral and political philosophers are increasingly using empirical data to inform their normative theories. This has sparked renewed interest into questions concerning the relationship between facts and principles. A recent attempt to frame these questions within a broader approach to normative theory comes from David Miller, who has on several occasions defended ‘contextualism’ as the best approach to justice. Miller argues that the context of distribution itself brings one or another political principle into play. This paper examines this claim. It considers several plausible strategies for carrying out Miller’s general project and argues that each strategy fails. Nevertheless, the author maintains that an investigation into why they fail paves the way for a philosophically plausible account of the relationship between facts and principles.Keywords: justice; contextualism; global distributive justice; justification; John Rawls; David Miller.

This paper interprets the relation between justice and legitimacy found in John Rawls's Political Liberalism and then applies it to the field of transitional justice. The author argues that transitional mechanisms can be better defended in terms of “legitimacy” than in “justice,” because the circumstances of transitional justice admit of reasonable disagreement over “just” public policy. In such circumstances, policy recommendations can always be construed as falling short of justice, thus raising plausible concerns over their normative justification. This paper attempts to answer such concerns by justifying transitional mechanisms as morally appropriate yet less than fully just. The author explains how the concept of legitimacy facilitates such a justification and how such a justification can secure the normative grounds that are ironically threatened by investigations relying on a concept of justice.

A recurrent challenge in applied ethics concerns the development of principles that are both suitably general to cover various cases and sufficiently exact to guide behavior in particular instances. In business ethics, two central approaches—stockholder and stakeholder—often fail by one or the other requirement. The author argues that the failure is precipitated by their reliance upon “universal” theory, which views the justification of principles as both independent of their context of application and universally appropriate to all contexts. The author develops a contextual interpretation of “constructivism” as an alternative approach, and argues that this alternative meets the above challenge.