PEA Soup

Call for Presentations: Cultural Diversity & Liberal Democracy: Models, Policies and Practice

A conference on the theme “Cultural Diversity & Liberal Democracy: Models, Policies and Practice” will be held at the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs, in Toronto, on April 19-20, 2016.  Confirmed keynote speakers include David Miller (Oxford) and Alan Patten (Princeton).  A call for presentations is attached.  The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2015.

Please see below the fold for details.  Queries should be directed to Kenneth McRoberts, the School’s Director, at [email protected].

Should college graduates get more votes?

Many of you will know that John Stuart Mill advocates a scheme whereby college graduates, and the more educated more generally, would get more votes. Like some universities, he even accepts work experience in leiu of formal education:

If every ordinary unskilled labourer had one vote, a skilled labourer, whose occupation requires an exercised mind and a knowledge of some of the laws of external nature, ought to have two. A foreman, or superintendent of labour, whose occupation requires something more of general culture, and some moral as well as intellectual qualities, should perhaps have three. A farmer, manufacturer, or trader, who requires a still larger range of ideas and knowledge, and the power of guiding and attending to a great number of various operations at once, should have three or four. A member of any profession requiring a long, accurate, and systematic mental cultivation—a lawyer, a physician or surgeon, a clergyman of any denomination, a literary man, an artist, a public functionary (or, at all events, a member of every intellectual profession at the threshold of which there is a satisfactory examination test) ought to have five or six. A graduate of any university, or a person freely elected a member of any learned society, is entitled to at least as many ("Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform").

Virtually everyone today agrees that this is a terrible idea. But why?

Schmucks and Philosopher Kings: A Dilemma for Well-Being Policy

It’s fashionable to call for supplementing traditional economic measures with measures targeting the impact of policies on well-being. Leaving aside worries about measuring well-being and implementing policies, a more basic question remains: should the state be in the business of monitoring and promoting people’s well-being in the first place? Call this the Question. I’m going to argue that there’s good reason to answer in the negative: either well-being policy is paternalistic towards the beneficiaries, or it imposes an undue burden on the benefactors. Insofar as we have positive duties toward each other, paternalism is the lesser evil.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Elizabeth Brake’s “Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law” with commentary by Cheshire Calhoun

We are pleased to present our second installment of PEA Soup's collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal.  The article selected from Volume 120, Issue 2, is Elizabeth Brake's "Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law" (open access copy here).  We are very grateful to Cheshire Calhoun for starting our discussion; her commentary follows beneath the fold...

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Elizabeth Brake’s “Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law”

We are pleased to announce the second installment of our collaboration with Ethics, where we will host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal will make a copy of that article freely available (for a limited time) to our participants. 

Our featured article is Elizabeth Brake's "Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law" (Volume 120, issue 2).  The article is now available here. 

Elizabeth Brake  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her book, tentatively entitled Rethinking Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and Law, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

We are also very pleased that Cheshire Calhoun has agreed to provide a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.  Professor Calhoun's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Tuesday, June 1, 2010.

Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University. She edits the Oxford University Press series Studies in Feminist Philosophy, and she is an associate editor for the journals Ethics and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.