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2nd Australian Political Theory and

Philosophy Conference
16-17 February 2018
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Contents

Conference Schedule............................................................1
Keynote Address...................................................................5
Acknowledgement of Country..............................................6
Abstracts..............................................................................7
Abercrombie Business School Floor Map..........................28
Conference Schedule
Friday 16 February 2018

Item Time Location Speaker Title


Registration, Coffee,
9:00 - 9:30
Welcome
Panel 1

Charlotte Epstein Denaturalising Private Property


2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

Jessica Whyte Neoliberalism and the Sweetness of Commerce


PROPERTY, UTILITY, AND
ABS SR
COMMERCE 9:30 - 11:15
2290 Tristan Bradshaw Aristotle on the Politics of Utility
(Chair Charlotte Epstein)

Adam Smith’s Politics: Liberty, Social Science and Pragmatic Proto-


Lisa Hill
Liberalism

Panel 2

John Tate Religious Offense and Freedom of Speech

Louise Richardson- Talking at Cross-Purposes: What is “Hate Speech”? What Do We


Self Want It to Be?
SPEECH AND TOLERANCE ABS SR
9:30 - 11:15
(Chair Peter Balint) 2040
Peter Balint Cultural Appropriation: What Can the Neutral Tolerant State Do?

The Turnbull Government’s Multicultural Policy: Retreat or


Geoffrey Levey
Mainstreaming?

Panel 3

Comparative Political Theory and Indigenous-settler Relations: The


Adrian Little
Genealogy of Makarrata

Comparative Political Theory and Indigenous-settler Relations: The


David Allinson
Genealogy of Makarrata
INDIGENEITIES ABS SR
9:30 - 11:15
(Chair Adrian Little) 2050 Putting Hegel to Work in Contemporary Australia: A Philosophical
Loughlin Gleeson
Contribution to the Indigenous Recognition Debate

Alejandra Gaitan- Epistemological Blindness or Violence: Liberal Multiculturalism and


Barrera the Indigenous Quest for Autonomy

Break 11:15 - 11:30


Panel 4

The New Nature of Human Action: Young and Jonas on


Nishan Varatharajan
ACTION AND POSSIBILITY ABS SR Technology, Possibility and Responsibility
The University of Sydney

11:30 - 12:30
(Chair Nishan Varatharajan) 2290
Nicholas Southwood Feasibility for Collectives

Panel 5

Luara Ferracioli A Right to Parent and the Role of Commitment


APPLIED POLITICAL
ABS SR
PHILOSOPHY 11:30 - 12:30 Aleksandar Radakovic The Paradox of Multinational Federalism
2040
(Chair Luara Ferracioli)

Susan Pennings Measuring the Value of Health Care

Lunch 12:30 - 13:30


Panel 6

Vivek Yadav Counting Miscount in Democratic Politics

Lachlan Umbers Compulsory Voting: A Defence


VOTING AND POLITICAL
ABS SR
PARTICIPATION 13:30 - 15:00
2290
(Chair Lachlan Umbers) Jensen Sass Mandates that Matter

Associative Political Duties: Is Political Membership Intrinsically


Robbie Arrell
Valuable and Does it Matter?
Page 1
Panel 7

Miguel Vatter Dignity and Humanity: Averroistic, Not Christian

Dimitris Vardoulakis Moses and the Origins of Authority


EARLY MODERN
ABS SR
THOUGHT 13:30 - 15:00
2040
(Chair Sandra Field) Simon Cotton Do Transnational Distributive Duties Require Hobbesian Assurance

Sandra Field Realism and Idealism in Spinoza's Politics.

Panel 8

Kate Phelan Emancipation Is Not an Epistemic Project

Richard Rowland Public Reason and Epistemic Peerhood


EPISTEMOLOGY AND
ABS SR
EPISTEMIC JUSTICE 13:30 - 15:00
2050 Albina Kartavtceva Truth and Rhetoric: the Case of Vladimir Putin
(Chair John Kane)

Normative Political Theory, International Theory Realism and the


John Kane
Problem of Truth

Afternoon Tea 15:00 - 15:30


Panel 9

Liberalism as a Way of Life: on the Spiritual Exercises of John


Alexandre Lefebvre
Rawls

RAWLS ABS SR
15:30 - 16:30 Lukas Opacic Diverging Paths: Rawls and Anscombe on Theorising about Justice
(Chair Alexandre Lefebvre) 2290

Rawl’s Political Conception of Justice: A Philosophy for Citizens or


Benjamin Brice
a City for Philosophers?

Panel 10

Darlene Demandante Political Subjectivity in-between Aesthetics and Politics

FEELING AND
ABS SR The Judgement of Taste: The Philosophy and Politics of Australia’s
AESTHETICS 15:30 - 16:30 Deborah Mills
2040 National Arts Policy
(Chair Annette Pierdziwol)

Annette Pierdziwol Nussbaum and Hume on the Cultivation of Emotion

Panel 11

Commentators:
AUTHOR MEETS READERS
ABS SR Andrew Benjamin Panel on Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stasis Before the Law: Nine Theses
1 15:30 - 16:30
2050 Romand Coles on Agonistic Democracy (Fordham 2017).
(Chair Andrew Benjamin)
Dimitris Vardoulakis

Danielle Celermajer
ABS CS LT Telling Responsible Stories: Can Theories of Distributed Agency
Keynote 16:45 - 18:00 (Chair Alexandre
2080 Help us Prevent Torture?
Lefebvre)

ABS SR
Meeting 18:00 - 18:45 Meeting for the Political Theory Association of Australasia
2280

Dinner 19:00
Page 2
Conference Schedule
Saturday 17 February 2018

Item Time Location Speaker Title


Morning Tea 9:00 - 9:30
Panel 12

Shopping and Sustainability: Considering Kate Soper’s Alternative


Bronwyn McDonald
Hedonism
ENVIRONMENTAL
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

ABS SR
POLITICAL THEORY 9:30 - 11:15 Blue Screen Biosphere: the Absent Presence of Biodiversity in
2290 Anthony Burke
(Chair Jeremy Moss) International Law

Jeremy Moss Climate Change, Emissions, Historical Responsibility

Panel 13

Jeremy Arnold The Pleasure of Freedom: Arendtian Judgment Reconsidered

60 Years of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition: Thinking through and


Mary Walsh
KEY THINKERS: ARENDT, beyond Dark Times
ABS SR
FOUCAULT, RANCIÈRE 9:30 - 11:15
2040
(Chair Paul Patton)
Duncan Stuart Rancière, Humanism and Politics

Paul Patton Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy

Panel 14

Analysing Political Deception: The Virtues of Bernard Williams' Anti-


Ben Cross
Tyranny Argument

DESPOTISM AND Lars Moen Completing the Ideal of Non-Domination


ABS SR
TYRANNY 9:30 - 11:15
2050
(Chair Quinlan Bowman)
Ten-Herng Lai The Ethics of Political Vandalism

Quinlan Bowman Governing the Barbarians: Considerations of Mill's Defense of Despotism

Break 11:15 - 11:30


Panel 15

Melanie White Wollstonecraft's Legacy for Citizenship Studies

FAMILY AND EDUCATION ABS SR


11:30 - 12:30 Miriam Bankovsky The Family, Ethics and Economics: An Unorthodox History
(Chair Melanie White) 2290

Kirsty Macfarlane A Pluralist Account of Educational Justice


The University of Sydney

Panel 16

Max Fedoseev Responsibility to Remedy Structural Injustice

JUSTICE ABS SR
11:30 - 12:30 Nicholas Barry Facts, Principles, and Egalitarian Justice
(Chair Nicholas Barry) 2050

Devon Cass Equality and Position

Lunch 12:30 - 13:30


Panel 17

Morality in War: The Relevance of Intentions to Permissibility in Jus Ad


Beba Cibralic
Bellum

RAND Corporation: Decision Making Theoretic


Ihab Shalbak
The Uncertainties of Certain Death
WAR AND VIOLENCE ABS SR
13:30 - 15:00
(Chair Ihab Shalbak) 2290
Collective Traumas as a Force for Political Activism and Change:
Ahlam AbuKhoti
Examples from Tunisia, and Egypt.

The 'Thingly Power' of Border Walls: Towards Meshwork Thinking in


Umut Ozguc
Border Studies
Page 3
Panel 18

Sophie Reid Representative Claims as Arguments

Thomas Besch Reciprocity, Idealization, and Discursive Purchase


CONCEPTS AND
ABS SR
REPRESENTATION 13:30 - 15:00
2040 Ambiguity and Vagueness in Political Concepts: On Coding and
(Chair Thomas Besch) Keith Dowding
Referential Vacuity

Gearóid Brinn Radical Political Realism and Non-sectarian Meta-theory

Panel 19

Sanjay Ramesh Elite Hegemony in Australia: a Neo-Gramscian Typology

José-Miguel Bello y
Economic Foundations of Inalienable Rights
Villarino
INEQUALITY ABS SR
13:30 - 15:00
(Chair Annette Maguire) 2050
Annette Maguire Gendered Violence & Feminised Resistance in the Age of Empire

Reshoring and Partiality: The Social Relations of Globalisation and


Mark Howard
Technological Innovation

Afternoon Tea 15:00 - 15:30


Panel 20

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE Li-chia Lo Cosmopolitanism and the Foreigner


ABS SR
AND COSMOPOLITANISM 15:30 - 16:30
2290
(Chair Steven Slaughter) Steven Slaughter Republican Global Governance

Panel 21

Commentators:
Nicholas Barry
AUTHOR MEETS READERS ABS SR Luara Ferracioli Panel on Daniel Halliday, The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and
15:30 - 16:30
2 2050 Stewart Braun the Right to Bequeath (Oxford 2018).
(Chair Nicholas Barry) Daniel Halliday

ABS CS LT Philip Pettit


Keynote 16:45 - 18:00 Corporations: The Other Artificial Intelligence Problem
2080 (Chair Simon Tormey)

Page 4
Keynote Address

Telling Responsible Stories: Can Theories of Distributed Agency Help Us Prevent


Torture?
Danielle Celermajer
University of Sydney

A number of bodies of contemporary thought, including new materialisms, actor network theories and
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

assemblage theories challenge the modernist image of the sovereign individual as the site of agency and
source of action. Two types of political implication generally follow. First, they require that we remap
our causal stories, embedding humans within (not above) ontologically flatter structures. Second, they
place ethical demands on humans’ relationships with the more-than-human or non-human world. At the
same time, by challenging traditional conceptions of agency, they carry implications for the attribution of
responsibility, implications that are especially troubling when it comes to the crimes which, in the words of
the UDHR, ‘shock the conscience of mankind’.

In this paper, I argue that, if skilfully deployed, these theories provide rich resources for efforts to prevent
human rights violations, and potentially afford the theoretical infrastructure to support more systemic,
and potentially more effective preventative strategies. This potential will not, however, be self-executing.
Its realisation requires careful re-storying of the field of human rights. We need to distinguish between
punishment and prevention, and the objectives each seeks to achieve, between the systemic interventions
that may be most effective in altering behaviours and our moral intuitions and affective responses to
atrocities and perpetrators, and between the narratives that animate outrage and those that support
systemic prevention strategies.

Danielle Celermajer is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of
Sydney. She was the recipient of two European Commission grants to work on human rights in the Asia
Pacific, one on education and the other on torture prevention. She has two forthcoming books, Poisoned
Orchards: A systemic approach to the prevention of torture (Cambridge University Press) and, with Richard
Sherwin, A Cultural History of Law on the Modern Age (Bloomsbury).
The University of Sydney
Page 5
Keynote Address

Corporations: The Other Artificial Intelligence Problem


Philip Pettit
Princeton University
Australian National University

Artificial intelligence, in the computational form, is held up as a problem insofar as it promises to have
enormous power, to lack empathy and to be out of intentional control. But artificial intelligence, in the
corporate form, is already with us. And it already has the three characteristics that make it into a serious
political problem.

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University,
and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is author of
many books, including most recently On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy
(Cambridge, 2012), Just Freedom: a Moral Compass for a Complex World (Norton, 2014), The Robust
Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect (Oxford 2015), and The Birth of Ethics:
Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality (Oxford 2018).

Acknowledgment of Country

The conference organisers would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land
on which we meet; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University
of Sydney is built. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices within this
university may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship
of Country.
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Abstracts

Panel 1: PROPERTY, UTILITY, AND COMMERCE


(Chair Charlotte Epstein)

Denaturalising Private Property the inauspicious circumstances of the early twentieth-


2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

century, neoliberalism was founded on an attempt to


Charlotte Epstein revive the argument that an unrestrained competitive
University of Sydney market would replace violence, and coercive colonial rule
with peaceful, mutually-beneficial, voluntary relations.
In this paper I undertake a genealogy of the place of the Yet, just as the original sweetness of commerce thesis
body in the naturalisation of private property in early emerged in a context marked by the brutal violence of
modernity. John Locke’s theorisation of private property European colonization, the neoliberal civilizing mission
afforded a crucial pillar for colonization, and an enduring is best understood as a permanent war for free markets-
legitimation of the ‘unshakeability’ of private property in with all the extensive ‘collateral damage’ that entails.
liberal thought. What has been less noticed is the crucial
role that the body played in his account of the origins of
private property. In this paper I bring this role into light
Aristotle on the Politics of Utility
by considering closely his concept of ‘appropriation’.
Locke’s private property is the result of a process, Tristan Bradshaw
‘appropriation’, that radiates out from the body. The Northwestern University
Indian owns the acorn that his hand grabs in the same way
that he owns his hand, and reaching for it is as natural as In today’s dominant approaches to utility, utility denotes
feeding himself. What focussing on the body draws out, the satisfaction of individuals’ needs as “preferences”
moreover, is that not all toiling bodies qualify for this that principally takes place through exchange in the
appropriating process generative of private property: the market economy in a context of scarce resources.
servant is explicitly excluded; while the presence of the Utility, then, connotes an activity and a sphere that are
Indian (the brown body) contrasts with the absence of the understood to be essentially distinct and separate from
slave (the black body) in whose labour lay the empirical politics. There is, however, another way to configure
referent for Locke’s own entreprise. utility and politics. In his ethical texts, Aristotle wrote that
utility friendship-whose function is the exchange of useful
goods-is “political friendship.” In this paper, I expand on
Neoliberalism and the Sweetness of this notion by drawing on Aristotle’s etiology of the polis
The University of Sydney

Commerce in his Politics. By bringing these passages together, I argue


that in Aristotle there is what I call a “politics of expansive
Jessica Whyte utility” that is grounded in individuals’ abundant potential
Western Sydney University capacities (dynamis) that is crucial for understanding how
political activity can take place at all. As such, I argue
In his classic 1977 book The Passions and the Interests,
that Aristotle deviates from contemporary theories of
Albert Hirschman identified a distinctive argument for the
utility because subjective valuation moves beyond the
‘civilizing’ effects of the market. On Hirschman’s telling,
exchange of objects-which appears to displace politics-
the thesis that commerce was a source of “sweetness,
and confronts the question of specifically human utility-as
softness, calm and gentleness” (douceur) appealed to
both usefulness and happiness (eudaimonia)-that can
seventeenth-century Europeans who longed to be free of
inform a political theory of radical democracy.
warring passions. In the wake of the French Revolution,
the Napoleonic Wars and the social dislocation of the
industrial revolution, he argues, the thesis was eclipsed
by anxieties that, far from promoting morality and
“civilization”, the market was undermining moral virtues
and producing widespread anomie, atomization and class
conflict. By the twentieth-century, Hirschman concludes,
no observer could still subscribe to the hopeful vision
Page 7

of the market. This paper shows, in contrast, that, in


Adam Smith’s Politics: Liberty, Social order of authoritativeness. At the bottom, and of least
importance, was his commitment to negative liberty.
Science and Pragmatic Proto-Liberalism
Second was how the problem sat with the conservative
Lisa Hill aspects of his social science. The third and most
University of Adelaide authoritative test of all was whether the policy had good
outcomes. If it did, Smith readily abandoned these other
On Adam Smith’s account, what values should political commitments. Therefore, he was less libertarian and
leaders prioritise when forming policy? For many, more consequentialist than is normally allowed.and of
Smith’s unbending priority was the promotion of least importance, was his commitment to negative liberty.
negative liberty. For others, Smith had no discernible or Second was how the problem sat with the conservative
consistent approach at all. This paper challenges these aspects of his social science. The third and most
misconceptions by exploring the limits of liberty in Smith’s authoritative test of all was whether the policy had good
thought. In order to make the art of governing more outcomes. If it did, Smith readily abandoned these other
social-scientific and more productive of good effects commitments. Therefore, he was less libertarian and
he used a three-stage method that filtered political more consequentialist than is normally allowed.
problems through three tests, arranged in ascending

Panel 2: SPEECH AND TOLERANCE


(Chair Peter Balint)
Religious Offense and Freedom of Speech socially legitimate ends - ‘protecting free speech’ and
‘ensuring equality’ - in tension. However, it is not clear
John Tate that political theorists who oppose or support legislative
University of Newcastle
(or other) restrictions on hate speech share the same
notion of the concept - that is, they may be talking at
Religion is a matter that the religiously devout take
cross-purposes. This paper highlights the similarities
seriously. While most religiously devout individuals are
and differences across various conceptions of hate
willing to refrain from violence or murder in response to
speech. It is important to undertake such a conceptual-
speech that they find religiously offensive, recent events
analytical analysis in order to answer the questions ‘what
show that others are not. Consequently, finding some
is hate speech?’ and ‘what do we want it to be?’ - Once
means to persuade the religiously devout to “tolerate”
answered, we may reach stronger concordance on the
such speech is an urgent political and philosophical
balance to be struck between our socially legitimate ends.
issue, particularly within liberal democracies where
a commitment to freedom of speech, particularly on
matters of religion, is upheld as an overriding norm. This
paper seeks to find such a foundation for “toleration” Cultural Appropriation: What Can the
among the religiously devout. Neutral Tolerant State Do?
Peter Balint
UNSW Canberra
Talking at Cross-Purposes: What is ‘Hate
Speech’? What Do We Want It to Be? A neutral, or at least ‘hands off’ neutral institution, does
not seem to have grounds to try and stop individuals
Louise Richardson-Self appropriating particular cultural markers. If, for example,
University of Tasmania
an institution allows the wearing of turbans as part of a
work uniform, then it would seem anybody should be able
Sally Haslanger (2000; 2012), proposes that there are
to wear a turban (they wouldn’t need to be a registered
three types of inquiry we can undertake when asking
Sikh first). In cases where a non-Sikh wearing the turban
what-is-X style questions: conceptual, descriptive, or
is simply unintentionally offensive, it seems hard for
analytical. Conceptual inquiry aims to flesh out what
a liberal neutral state to act on this. But what about
‘we’ mean when we use the concept, descriptive inquiry
when the offense is deliberate, such as occurs in cases
aims to track how the concept in fact applies in day-to-
of mocking cultural appropriation? I will suggest that
day life, while analytical inquiry is both normative and
because tolerance is a matter of degree (the prevention/
ameliorative: it asks, given our (socially legitimate) ends,
non-prevention view is too strong), institutions have
what should our concept of X be, or what work should
reasons to both permit and to hinder. That is, there are
that concept do? Hate speech is often seen to place two
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good reasons to be tolerant (eg free expression), but also


good reasons to discourage such behaviour (eg belittling). widely stressed the 2017 statement’s departure from
I will argue that doing the right thing need not involve previous multicultural policy. And, indeed, the Turnbull
choosing between either passive tolerance or preventing policy is the only national multicultural policy to eschew
such acts, but can involve hindering but not preventing. using the word ‘multiculturalism’. Yet several prominent
Interestingly, practising this form of tolerance at the same supporters of multiculturalism publicly endorsed
time involves also practising a degree of intolerance. the new policy statement, including Andrew Markus,
Tim Soutphommasane, Sev Ozdowski, and the Ethnic
Communities’ Council of Victoria. In this paper, I ask
The Turnbull Government’s Multicultural whether the Turnbull government’s multicultural policy
constitutes a fundamental retreat from multiculturalism
Policy: Retreat or Mainstreaming?
Australian-style or a continuation and perhaps
Geoffrey Levey mainstreaming of Australian multiculturalism principles.
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

UNSW I suggest that a case for effective continuity could be


made at the practical level, and a case for mainstreaming
On 20 March 2017, Malcolm Turnbull’s coalition multiculturalism can be made theoretically. However, I
government launched its multicultural policy Multicultural argue that the terms of the Turnbull policy amount to a
Australia: United, Strong, Successful. It is the fifth radical break with and repudiation of the principles of
such policy statement in the multicultural era, the Australian multiculturalism given the circumstances of
previous one being the Gillard Labor government’s contemporary Australian state and society.
2011 statement, The People of Australia. Media reports

Panel 3: INDIGENEITIES
(Chair Adrian Little)
Comparative Political Theory and An Indigenous Voice to Parliament
Indigenous-settler Relations: The
David Allinson
Genealogy of Makarrata University of Melbourne

Adrian Little The Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Referendum
University of Melbourne
Council’s report have called for, among other things,
a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament. The
This paper builds on a recent article (Little 2018) analysing
Voice will give advice to government on Indigenous
the methodological foundations of comparative political
affairs, but the Prime Minister has called for more detail
theory (CPT). CPT has emerged in the 21st Century as a
before Cabinet will discuss the Referendum Council’s
distinctive strand of contemporary thought focused on
recommendations.
The University of Sydney

the neglect of non-Western traditions within the canon


of political theory. I argue that this approach overstates
This paper discusses some of the philosophical, political
the coherence of traditions and the fact that most of
and jurisprudential problems attendant to the Voice to
the ideas studied within CPT actually emerged through a
Parliament. For example, firstly, is it to be representative
relationship and exchange between Western and non-
of Indigenous communities, how will that work? Secondly,
Western traditions of thought. To exemplify this point, I
if it is to have powers of referral to Federal Parliament,
focus on Indigenous-settler relations in Australia with a
how will it remain consistent with democratic processes
specific focus on the idea of makarrata - ‘an Aboriginal
and values? Thirdly, how can the constitutional provision
ceremonial ritual symbolizing the restoration of peace
and enabling legislation (philosophically) respect the
after a dispute’ - as a case in point of the relational nature
sovereignty of Parliament? This paper aims to contribute
of the development of language and concepts in political
to, and facilitate, productive discussion around these
theory.
questions.
Page 9
Putting Hegel to Work in Contemporary political measures and changes needed to maximally
recognise Indigenous Australians (IV).
Australia: A Philosophical Contribution to
the Indigenous Recognition Debate
Loughlin Gleeson Epistemological Blindness or Violence:
UNSW Liberal Multiculturalism and the
Indigenous Quest for Autonomy
This paper will aim to offer a philosophical contribution-
one which is grounded in Hegel’s writings and the Alejandra Gaitan-Barrera
attendant scholarship-to the current debate surrounding Griffith University
the issue of the recognition of Indigenous Australians.
The specific form that this contribution will take is From 1960s onwards, liberal multiculturalism, from Iris
that of advocating for a shift away from the prevailing M. Young’s notion of a ‘differentiated citizenship’ or what
view that recognition be treated as an exclusively legal Rodolfo Stavenhagen terms ‘internal self-determination’,
matter necessitating constitutional reform towards an to Will Kymlicka’s multicultural citizenship and federacy
alternative, Hegelian conception according to which arrangements, Arendt Lijphart’s consociationalism and
recognition designates an intersubjective attitudinal Rainer Bauböck’s pluralist federation, has played a
phenomenon that assumes within social reality a fundamental role in the recognition of difference as well
number of different forms (‘axiological’, ‘deontological’ as questioning the configuration of the nation-state as
and ‘contributive’), each of which are essential for the racially homogenous and administratively unitary. So far,
realisation of concrete human freedom and well-being. these liberal approaches have successfully addressed
I will begin by offering a critique of the relevant debate and accommodated some of the core political and
concerning Indigenous Australians on basis of the cultural demands of religious and ethnic minorities.
‘formalistic’ understanding of (constitutional) recognition However, this paper via field research conducted in Chile
that it underwrites it (I). Next, I will consider Hegel’s and Nicaragua theorizes that in the case of indigenous
systematic philosophical conception of recognition, quest for autonomy, these approaches exude nothing
adumbrating each of its various dimensions (II). On this but epistemological blindness, ignoring or dismissing
basis, I will then proceed to consider not only the various alterity. At worst, they function as an epistemic violence
forms of systemic non-/mis-recognition that have and that silences, incorporates and decontests synchronic
continue to plague Indigenous Australians in the relevant alternative autonomist indigenous articulations.
differentiated sense (III) but also the possible social and

Panel 4: ACTION AND POSSIBILITY


(Chair Nishan Varatharajan)

The New Nature of Human Action: Young role of luck and the moral culpability of ignorance in late
modernity. What remains under-theorised for Young,
and Jonas on Technology, Possibility and
however, is the modern relationship between power and
Responsibility responsibility. This paper thus seeks to expand Young’s
social connections model by reference to Hans Jonas’
Nishan Varatharajan
University of Sydney reflections on just this relationship. Here, I hope to
explore how modern technology has expanded the sphere
Iris Young’s ‘social connections model’ rests on three of human action (scales, objects and consequences)
distinctive insights; that individualistic and regressive beyond anything we have possessed before - i.e. our
models of responsibility are ill-suited to cases of global influence can stretch beyond contemporaries, beyond the
structural injustice; that all individuals ‘connected’ to foreseeable reach of a human life, and irreversibly impact
social processes which produce global structural injustice the earth and generations of human/nonhuman animals
share responsibility (even victims); and, finally, that such - to argue that techno-political arrangements necessarily
shared responsibility must be discharged politically in a pre-empt moral reasoning about responsibility.
remedial, forward-looking manner. These insights not only
highlight the contours of contemporary ethical issues (e.g.
global fast fashion) but, more broadly, they point toward
Page 10

the increasing role of connectedness, the decreasing


Feasibility for Collectives agents. This has highly revisionary implications given
the central role that such groups play in politics. The
Nicholas Southwood current paper explores the alternative suggestion that
ANU whether or not the idea of feasibility is applicable to such
groups depends crucially on the particular purpose(s)
It is commonly assumed that what we ought to do
associated with the particular core normative practice(s)
is somehow constrained or conditioned by what is
in the service of which the idea of feasibility is supposed
feasible. Yet it remains unclear how (if at all) a “feasibility
to operating. It may well be that some aspects of our
requirement” (Brennan and Southwood 2007) is supposed
practice (e.g. making and deploying feasibility claims
to be applicable in the case of relatively unstructured
in the service of criticising groups) do require agency.
groups. One natural thought is that because feasibility
Other aspects of our practice (e.g. making and deploying
is a so-called “agentive modal” it is inapplicable to
feasibility claims in the service of group deliberation) only
such groups insofar as they fail to constitute actual
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

require mutual responsiveness.


(Lawford-Smith 2012) or potential (Collins 2013) groups

Panel 5: APPLIED POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY


(Chair Luara Ferracioli)

A Right to Parent and the Role of characteristics of such federal states: one being the
existence of multinational groups within such states and
Commitment
the other being the introduction of democracy and the
Luara Ferracioli right for self-determination. My interest lies in exploring
The University of Sydney/University of Amsterdam what are the causes for federal disintegration under
the conditions mentioned above, what are the best
In this paper I focus on the following question: what gives institutional arrangements for prevention of this event,
a person a moral right to parent a particular child? I first but also whether the break-up of federal structures is
argue that the correct answer to this question must (i) necessarily a negative effect that needs to be prevented.
take seriously the interests of both parents and children,
(ii) include the claims of adoptive parents, and (iii) do
justice to the entirety of the parent-child relationship. I Measuring the Value of Health Care
then put forward a novel account of moral parenthood
that meets all of these conditions. I call this account the Susan Pennings
commitment account. On this account, a moral parent is Australian National University

not someone who merely consents to the parental role or


who merely played a role in the child’s existence; rather, I will discuss two metrics to measure the value of
The University of Sydney

a moral parent is someone who engages in certain kinds health care interventions: Disability Adjusted Life Years
of moral actions due to a recognition of the value of the (DALYs) and Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). These
parent-child relationship. measures are intended to help policymakers allocate
funds impartially and efficiently, and are widely used in
national health policies as well as by the World Health
Organization. I will discuss a number of objections about
The Paradox of Multinational Federalism
the use of these health metrics: that they are inaccurate
Aleksandar Radakovic about the lived experiences of people with disabilities,
University of Auckland that they involve forced conflation of incommensurable
goods, that their current usage fails principles of public
Multinational federations are federal states in which justification, and that they obscure issues of distributive
territorial subunits are formed as to correspond to the justice. I will go on to discuss alternative health metrics
geographic presence of particular national groups. It is a and the importance of including measures of subjective
common argument to say how territorial self-rule in such well-being in considering how to prioritise health care
federal states can bring about two opposing effects; one interventions.
effect being the strengthening of the state and integration
of sub-territories and the other being succession or
disintegration - the so-called paradox of federalism.
The last effect, the effect of political disintegration,
Page 11

is not necessarily but still typically conditioned by two


Panel 6: VOTING AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
(Chair Lachlan Umbers)

Counting Miscount in Democratic Politics yield electoral results that signal when a newly elected
government has a genuine mandate, and how strong that
Vivek Yadav mandate is. On these terms, voters would be afforded a
Indian Institute of Technology Indore choice between candidates and, supplementary to this, a
binary choice indicating their level of support. Were this
The study will examine the exclusion of untouchables device instituted, it would transform the folkish notion
within the framework of ‘demos’ in democratic politics. of a mandate into a powerful normative concept, one
Ambedkar call this process of exclusion Slaves of that could guide political and institutional evaluation and
Slaves and Ranciere defined this process of exclusion compel parties in a deliberative direction.
as Archipolitics. This part of exclusion of untouchables
will amalgamate with the term ‘miscount’ given by
Rancier, where he navigates democracy as not a system
Associative Political Duties: Is Political
of government, but always as the incompatible and
disruptive appearance of the principle of equality. By Membership Intrinsically Valuable and
extracting these major points, this study will suggest a way Does it Matter?
of overcoming deficiencies and propose indispensability
of disagreement to achieve equality in democracy. Robbie Arrell
Wuhan University

Some argue that certain of the duties one has towards


Compulsory Voting: A Defence one’s political society and/or co-members are relevantly
similar to the duties one has towards one’s parents,
Lachlan Umbers children, friends, lover(s), etc. The “associative” political
ANU/UNSW
duties argument typically begins from the premise that
This talk is part of a wider project in which I aim to offer a (P1) membership of a political society is intrinsically
defence of compulsory voting by appeal to the wrongness valuable. It is then said that (P2) to participate in
of free-riding. Amongst the most important challenges an intrinsically valuable association just is (amongst
to that argument – and to the institution of compulsory other things) to have associative duties towards those
voting more generally – is that compulsory voting would with whom one shares it (these duties being partially
entail unacceptable moral costs. Opponents charge, constitutive of, and justified by, the value of those
variously, that compulsory voting leads to lower-quality associations). Thus, one has associative political duties
results, deprives the citizenry of the valuable effects of towards one’s own political society/co-members that
abstention, and violates a right not to vote. In this talk, one does not have towards other political societies/
I respond to these objections, making frequent use of non-members.
recent empirical studies along the way.
In this paper, I reject this argument for associative
political duties. Firstly, I show that the conditionalism
of the value of political membership that defenders of
Mandates that Matter
this argument invariably invoke internally undermines P1,
Jensen Sass suggesting political membership can only be extrinsically
University of Canberra valuable. Secondly, I challenge P2 as a claim about
special associations generally, disputing the purported
In classical theories of political representation, elections conceptual connection between intrinsically valuing one’s
are seen to serve one of two different and indeed participation in some association and seeing it as a source
competing purposes. As a retrospective mechanism-the of associative duties. Finally, I propose an alternative
accountability view-elections allow voters to “kick the membership goods account of associative political duties.
bastards out”. As a prospective mechanism-the mandate
view-they allow voters to register support for a party’s
policy platform. A difficulty, however, is that elections
do not yield the information needed to determine which
view better describes an electorate’s intentions. As such,
a government elected for not being “the bastards” can
claim to possess a strong mandate, even where there is
little popular support for their policies. The aim of this
Page 12

paper is to describe a simple electoral device that would


Panel 7: EARLY MODERN THOUGHT
(Chair Sandra Field)

Dignity and Humanity: Averroistic, not Do Transnational Distributive Duties


Christian Require Hobbesian Assurance
Miguel Vatter Simon Cotton
UNSW ANU

Recent genealogies of human rights have increasingly Critics of global egalitarianism often claim that duties
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

emphasized the Christian origins of two fundamental of distributive justice-i.e. duties to reduce unfair
concepts involved in the idea of human rights, namely, inequalities-depend on agents being jointly subject
dignity and humanity. One thinks in this context of recent to a coercive state, and thus do not pertain across
works by historians like Tierney and Oakley, philosophers international borders. (Duties to address absolute
of law like Waldron, and intellectual historians like Moyn. deprivation, in contrast, are natural duties.) This claim
In this paper I would like to contest this genealogy and is perplexing, and not just because it is most intuitive to
propose an alternative one. Its origins are to be found in think that the state is merely necessary for such duties
the reception of Averroism in the Latin West, principally to be fulfilled. First, the most familiar argument for
by Dante. In this context I will reconstruct the idea of non-natural distributive duties is the argument from fair
dignity discussed in Kantorowicz with regard to Dante, play, which is premised on corresponding right-bearers
and show its influence on the Kantian construal of rights restraining themselves rather than being coerced. More
and human dignity. The main philosophical purchase of significantly, it is perplexing because the canonical
this exercise is to show that neither dignity nor humanity philosopher to whom such critics often appeal, Hobbes,
pertains to the individual “person” but always and only to was concerned with self-defence and commutative
the individual as a member of the human species-being; obligations rather than distributive justice. In this
additionally, I will argue that on this Averroistic construal, paper, then, I seek to delineate two broadly Hobbesian
human dignity is not a status that is exclusive of the claim arguments that might be offered in support of this
that other species of living beings also have claim to equal position. The first is a corollary of an extensive right to
dignity. self-defence. The second presumes that, unfortunately,
assurance of others’ likewise behaviour is necessary for
any individual agent to be able to even contribute to a
Moses and the Origins of Authority just distribution. And, at least globally, there can be no
assurance without coercion.
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Western Sydney University

Realism and Idealism in Spinoza’s politics


There seems to be a profound fascination with the figure
of Moses in early modernity. From Machiavelli to Hobbes,
The University of Sydney

Sandra Field
Moses is regarded as the most significant prophet of the Yale-NUS College
Old Testament. Even though Moses is also the most talked
about figure in Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza’s politics confronts the reader with an unstable
still his position in the text is ambivalent. I will explore mix of political realism and idealism. On the one hand,
this ambivalence by noting how Moses is presented as Spinoza insists that the political theorist must consider
the paradigmatic figure of personal authority in Spinoza’s people as they are, not as she would like them to be. But
Treatise. I will also explain how Spinoza’s epicureanism on the other hand, Spinoza presents democracy as the
is geared toward a critique of all forms of authority most absolute of all regimes, celebrating the spontaneous
(auctoritas). To highlight Spinoza’s position, I will compare goodness of the multitude, against the corrupt reality of
his construction of Moses to two baroque representations political life.
of Moses that are contemporary to the composition of his How should the realist and idealist veins in Spinoza’s
Treatise, one by Ferdinand Bol and another by Rembrandt. politics be rendered consistent? Some commentators
have turned to Spinoza’s ethics for a solution. For Spinoza,
ethical ideals are not justified as true, but as useful.
People cannot freely choose to be virtuous, but their
increase in virtue might concretely be brought about
by imagining an exemplary model of ethical conduct.
Perhaps the more idealised invocations of democracy
Page 13

operate the same way.


I contest this proposed solution. I argue that for Spinoza
there is an important disanalogy between ethics and
politics, in light of which imaginative ideas of political
perfection are less efficacious and more risky than the
corresponding ideas in ethics. In result, I defend a reading
of Spinoza’s politics which downplays or circumscribes
the idealist elements in the texts.

Panel 8: EPISTEMOLOGY AND EPISTEMIC JUSTICE


(Chair John Kane)

Emancipation Is Not an Epistemic Project particular moral topic if we have a sufficient amount of
fundamentally moral judgments in common with A. I argue
Kate Phelan that we should accept this view and then explore whether
RMIT University
this view can be utilized to solve the aforementioned
problem that Rawlsian public reason liberals face. I
Women have been seen as lesser persons to men and
discuss whether Rawlsian public reason liberals can
treated as such. Feminism believes that this treatment
coherently, or should, hold that states and/or state
is oppressive and strives to emancipate women from
policies only need to be justifiable to those whom we can
that. Tacitly accepting that people’s natures determine
judge to be our epistemic peers about those policies and
how they ought to be treated, feminists have seen
whether this view provides public reason liberals with
emancipating women as a matter of shattering the belief
something very similar to the reasonable/unreasonable
that women are lesser persons and revealing the truth
person distinction that is not arbitrary, unjustified or
of what women are - full persons, men’s equals, entitled
ad-hoc.
to treatment as such. In other words, they have seen
emancipation as an epistemic project - a project of
revealing the truth of who women are. But in this paper
I argue that the depth of the damage of oppression is Truth and Rhetoric: the Case of Vladimir
such that women are, for having been seen so, lesser Putin
persons. We thus cannot shatter the belief that women
are lesser persons or reveal the truth that they are full Albina Kartavtceva
The University of Newcastle
persons. Emancipation cannot be an epistemic project.
I therefore argue that, however appealing this approach
Rhetoric is a specific technique of verbal communication
to emancipation and however lost we feel without it,
often exercised by politicians. It is most often identified
we feminists ought to abandon it and develop a new
as a means of persuasion and so is often either associated
one - one that allows us to face squarely the depth of the
or contrasted with ideals of “truth”. Philosophically, the
damage of oppression to women.
idea of rhetoric as a political tool that can be taught and
practiced stretches back to ancient Greece. This paper
will focus on the inaugural addresses of Russian leader,
Public Reason and Epistemic Peerhood Vladimir Putin, and will consider the relationship between
“truth” and “rhetoric” in those speeches. The paper
Richard Rowland
Australian Catholic University will explore how this modern political leader, exercising
authority within a Russian political context, employs
Rawlsian public reason liberals claim-and seem to need both “truth” and “rhetoric” to his political advantage. I
to claim for the sake of their project-that the state describe this process as “Political PR”. The advantage of
and its policies only need to be justified to reasonable analyzing Putin’s speeches within a framework of “Political
persons. But it has been argued that such a reasonable/ PR” is that this framework allows us to explore both
unreasonable persons distinction is either arbitrary, verbal and non-verbal rhetorical techniques, focusing on
unjustified, or makes versions of public reason liberalism both the discursive and the emotional elements within
that employ it un-interesting or lack normative this process of political communication. In this way, the
force. Recent developments in the literature on the framework of “Political PR” enables us to explore more
epistemological consequences of peer disagreement deeply the relationship between “truth” and “rhetoric” in
about moral issues suggest that we can only be justified the verbal strategies of politicians.
Page 14

in judging that an agent A is our epistemic peer about a


Normative Political Theory, International a U.S. administration that denigrated ‘the reality-based
community’). But this paper problematizes the issue by
Theory Realism and the Problem of Truth
emphasising the fluid nature of reality given the role of
John Kane human agency. The truth of what is enfolds that of what
Griffith University may be, or what is feasible. But feasibility, however
carefully judged, can be proven only in accomplishment.
This paper supports work critiquing IR ‘neorealism’ as a A genuinely realistic judgement thus recognises practical
purely descriptive, non-normative theory by emphasising constraints while identifying opportunities for effective
the normative force of the concept of truth. All realisms action without assuming guaranteed success. The true
imply claims about ‘reality’ -- about things as they actually normative force of realism therefore is to illuminate a
are independent of ‘subjective’ perspectives and desires. courageous path between endemic neorealist pessimism
They are thus tied to the concept of truth, which is always and the naive optimism of idealists or of hubristic actors
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

assumed to have inherent normative force. To deny what over-confident in material power.
seems evidently true (or to fail seriously to inquire into
the truth of relevant matters) is deemed hubristic folly
that invites practical comeuppance, as some recent
foreign policy choices confirm (see invasion of Iraq by

Panel 9: RAWLS
(Chair Alexandre Lefebvre)

Liberalism as a Way of Life: on the Diverging Paths: Rawls and Anscombe on


Spiritual Exercises of John Rawls Theorising about Justice
Alexandre Lefebvre Lukas Opacic
University of Sydney University of Sydney

What would it mean for liberalism to be depicted as a This paper sketches two different ways of conceiving of
self-standing way of life? Or, to use terms favoured by the task of theorising about justice centred on the work
liberal political philosophers, what would it mean for of John Rawls and G E M Anscombe. I outline these two
liberalism be a depicted as comprehensive doctrine: not conceptions of theorising, before going on to offer some
in the sense of being an offshoot of some other kind or criticisms of Rawls’ approach based on some observations
worldview (whether religious or secular), but as itself about the way in which Rawls conceives of the task of
an ethos and system of moral beliefs that encompasses political theory and what this means about the efficacy of
abstract theorising more generally. My contention is that
The University of Sydney

the whole of one’s life and which needs no other source


or support? In this paper, I argue that one version of Rawls’ theoretical project is indicative of a more general
liberalism “as a way of life” can be found in John Rawls’s attitude of many philosophers to the value of constructing
work, and more particularly, in what is basically the abstract political theories for the purpose of resolving or
only under-explored area of his philosophy: the moral at least clarifying our political disagreements, and that
psychology developed in Part III of A Theory of Justice, this attitude stems in part from a kind of scepticism about
along with a series of unpublished essays and lectures the ability of our ordinary lives to reveal the meanings of
from his papers archived at Harvard University. My goal the words and concepts we use in those disagreements.
will be to sketch a liberal way of living from Rawls that, As an alternative, I argue that the relevance of Anscombe’s
while not for everyone, and very clearly not for use philosophical method consists not in the validity of
as a political or constitutional blueprint, is ambitious, her specific conclusions about ethics but rather in the
attractive, and available for us today. way it represents a desire to bring philosophy back
into contact with the ordinary. What follows is that any
philosophy that purports to reflect or be relevant to our
political disagreements must take proper account of our
actual political lives, and that this kind of philosophy is
inconsistent with much of the abstract theorising done by
Rawls and others. Finally, I briefly outline a response to an
objection that the main argument in this paper collapses
Page 15

into the communitarian criticism of liberalism.


Rawl’s Political Conception of Justice: liberalism allows ‘that our political institutions contain
A Philosophy for Citizens or a City for sufficient space for worthy ways of life’ ” (PL V.8.4). But I
would ask in what sense it would be good for citizens to
Philosophers?
adopt a conception of justice which is indifferent to their
Benjamin Brice (reasonable) comprehensive doctrines, given that the vast
University of Sydney majority of these doctrines, if not all, are false (II.2.4),
that these doctrines are usually closely linked to social
In Political Liberalism (PL), John Rawls has insisted on the environment and upbringing (V.3.5), and that one could
political dimension of his conception of justice, where be held responsible for one’s ends (II.5.1). Actually, could
political is opposed to moral, religious or metaphysical not we say that such a scheme has rather been designed
(PL I). It never questions comprehensive doctrine “so long for philosophers who spend their whole life to question
as they are politically reasonable” (IX.1.2). In short, Rawls’ comprehensive doctrines than it has been for citizens
solution preserves a “reasonable pluralism” among the who have neither time nor passion for such enquiries?
comprehensive doctrines held by citizens.

Rawls justifies the goodness of his political conception of


justice: reasonable pluralism is a good thing and “political

Panel 10: FEELING AND AESTHETICS


(Chair Annette Pierdziwol)

Political Subjectivity in-between


Aesthetics and Politics The Judgement of Taste: The Philosophy
and Politics of Australia’s National Arts
Darlene Demandante
Macquarie University Policy
Deborah Mills
This paper will deal with the question, ‘who is the University of Sydney
subject of politics?’ through the work of the philosopher
Jacques Rancière particularly in his writings where My paper examines the values of Australia’s arts advocacy
he talks about the relationship between politics and coalitions and Australia’s national arts policy. This topic
aesthetics. Rancière directly links aesthetics to politics emerges from a desire to theorise the ways in which arts
with the thought that the task of political action in policy figures in the political landscape of Australia; a
aesthetics is that it requires a reconfiguration of the topic which does not appear in Australian political studies
conditions of sense perception. Meaning is disrupted literature.
by those elements, groups or individuals in society that
demand not only to exist but also to be perceived. The In this exploration, I draw on approaches from different
“distribution of the sensible” points to the political disciplines: public policymaking literature which offers
underpinnings of social perception. Thus for Rancière, insights into the process of public policymaking and
there is aesthetics at the core of politics. Rancière in particular the impact of the beliefs and values of
talks about how art can represent forms of subjective public policy networks on that process and shifts in the
mobilization as well as the relationship between the artist dominant values and beliefs of the Australian arts policy
and the people. In some of Rancière’s text, he represents subsystem over time. I also draw on normative arts and
concrete subjects represented by artists as well as cultural policy theory and cultural studies literature,
workers who used art for subjective mobilization. The including aesthetics, the latter providing a strong basis
questions to be answered in this paper will be: how do from which to explore two prominent policy core beliefs
these representations fit with the idea of a “subjectivity of Australia’s arts advocacy coalitions: support for
without subject” which is Rancière’s main argument in his excellence in the arts and support for access to the arts.
most famous work on politics, Disagreement? and What I argue that support for excellence in the arts is in fact
can be learned from this political subject? a value embodying the exercise of aesthetic judgement,
often referred to as taste, and its origins can be found
in the philosophies espoused by Kant which restrict the
exercise of this judgement to an aristocratic elite.
Page 16
Nussbaum and Hume on the Cultivation of resource and imaginative perspective-taking as a key
Emotion strategy for strengthening it. In this paper, I argue that
Hume’s writings on the passions and sympathy, which are
Annette Pierdziwol not considered by Nussbaum, contain unique resources
University of Notre Dame Australia for developing an account of the cultivation of emotion.
Such an account is friendly to Nussbaum’s articulation of
In her book Political Emotions, Nussbaum argues that the problem, but points us in the direction of an approach
political liberalism faces the challenge of “watery which places a stronger emphasis on the role of habit.
motivation” and needs to be complemented by an
account of the cultivation of emotion. She draws on both
the history of philosophy and contemporary empirical
work to provide this, identifying compassion as a key
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

Panel 11: AUTHOR MEETS READERS 1


(Chair Andrew Benjamin)

Panel on Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stasis and democracy. In response to the exclusions that are
the result of the way sovereignty operates Vardoulakis
Before the Law: Nine Theses on Agonistic
proposes a theory of democracy that emphasises and
Democracy (Fordham 2017) insists on an inherent and productive agonism within
the social. He draws on a range of thinkers that have
Commentators:
Andrew Benjamin (UTS/Monash) been central to the work of contemporary political
Romand Coles (ACU) theory. The two papers will set the stage for a detailed
Dimitris Vardoulakis (Western Sydney University) examination of what has to be one of the most important
reconceptualisations of democracy since the work of
The aim of the panel is to engage with the new theory of Chantal Mouffe.
democracy that emerges in Vardoulakis’ new book: Stasis
Before the Law: Nine Thesis on Agonistic Democracy.
The book explores the relationship between sovereignty

Panel 12: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICAL THEORY


The University of Sydney

(Chair Jeremy Moss)

Shopping and Sustainability: Considering found in consumption practices, and is complimentary


to thinking about the slow food movement, downsizing
Kate Soper’s Alternative Hedonism
trends such as ‘tiny houses’, and to practicing the ‘three
Bronwyn McDonald r’s’, to reduce, reuse, and recycle. This paper considers
The Univeristy of Newcastle the limitations as well as the promises that can be found
in Soper’s Alternative Hedonism, critically applying it to a
A key question for the consumer society is how to strike number of burgeoning ethical consumption practices.
a balance between people’s consumption needs and
the environmental consequences of satisfying those
needs. Philosopher Kate Soper’s theory of Alternative
Hedonism provides a unique normative attempt to rethink
consumption in light of growing global environmental
and social justice considerations. Soper’s theory
conceptualizes ways to live life more sustainably without
detracting from the gratification and pleasure to be
Page 17
Blue Screen Biosphere: the Absent Climate change, Emissions, Historical
Presence of Biodiversity in International Responsibility
Law
Jeremy Moss
UNSW
Anthony Burke
UNSW
How should the world’s remaining carbon budget be
Following a line of critique developed in the “Planet divided among countries? We assess the role of a fault-
Politics” manifesto (Millennium, 44:3 2016) this paper based principle in answering this question. Discussion
investigates and critiques the metaphysical strategies of the role of historical emissions in dividing the global
that underpin international environmental law, rendering carbon budget has tended to focus on emissions before
the global ecology exploitable under the guise of its 1990. We think that this is in part because 1990 seems so
protection. recent, and thus post-1990 emissions seem to constitute
a lesser portion of historical emissions. This point of
In film and TV production, the blue/green screen is a flat view was undoubtedly warranted in the early 1990s, when
surface upon which, through the mediation of computer discussion of fault-based principles in this context began.
technology, a new real can be created in its place. While this view still has some intuitive force, we find that
It enables what Jean Baudrillard called simulation-a it and the associated focus on pre-1990 emissions are
virtuality which appears more real than the real and now out of date. Emissions since 1990 in fact constitute
comes to assumes its place. The paper questions whether a large and rapidly increasing proportion of emissions
the biosphere-as a vital and entangled planetary system since 1750 - approximately half of the carbon emissions
of life and things with intrinsic integrity and value-is due to fossil fuel use and cement production, at the
visible and made actual in international environmental time of writing. We show that a restricted fault-based
law, or is instead rendered disturbingly virtual. principle, according to which emissions should be divided
among countries on the basis of their emissions since
Through a close critical reading of the major texts of 1990, is both viable and powerful. We consider standard
global environmental law, the paper shows how they objections to a fault-based principle in this context, how
establish a twofold humanism-as-statism: a Westphalian such a principle might more concretely be applied, and its
constitutional arrangement of global environmental likely implications.
governance and the importation, into international law,
of the entire Enlightenment metaphysics of humanity’s
domination over and rights to nature. By considering
both the textual/metaphysical transmutation of the
biosphere and ecosystems into ‘resources’ owned and
determined by states, and the extractive practices
enabled by these regimes, the paper asserts that
international environmental law enacts a double
disappearance: a disappearance of biodiversity from the
text of international law and from the actuality of the
world. Given the propensity of the Earth system towards
ever more radical and devastating change, such a political
metaphysics creates dangers that we can no longer afford
to ignore.
Page 18
Panel 13: KEY THINKERS: ARENDT, FOUCAULT,
RANCIÈRE
(Chair Paul Patton)

The Pleasure of Freedom: Arendtian Rancière, Humanism and Politics


Judgment Reconsidered
Duncan Stuart
University of Sydney
Jeremy Arnold
National University of Singapore
In 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that humanism was a
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

‘dishonest ideology’ an ‘exquisite excuse for plundering.’


Hannah Arendt never completed Judgment, which was
This critical attitude towards humanism was a mainstay of
to be the third part of The Life of the Mind. Scholars of
continental philosophy throughout the 60s and continues
Arendt and political judgment more broadly have often
to this day. One can find such attitudes in the work of
turned to Arendt’s lecture course on Kant for insight
Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Stephen White and Simon
into what that third part might have contained. I argue
Critchley. Although I oppose anti-humanism, my goal in
that scholars have entirely ignored Arendt’s own stated
this paper will be to show that the prevalence of anti-
reason for turning to judgment in the concluding pages
humanist views has resulted in a misreading of the French
of the second part of The Life of the Mind, Willing: that
philosopher Jacques Rancière. In contradistinction to
we turn to judgment in order to understand whether we
the writings of Bram Ievens and Samuel Chambers (as
should be pleased by our freedom. This paper argues
well as others), I argue that Rancière has an account of
that that explicit reason ought to entirely reorient our
humankind underpinning his work, i.e a humanism. This
understanding of Arendtian judgment so as to challenge
can be found in his defence of humanism and universalism
the various “deliberative” appropriations of Arendt’s
in his book Althusser’s Lesson as well as various articles
theory that have dominated the critical reception of
and interviews. To further my point, I undertake a close
her later writings. On my argument, Arendtian judgment
reading of the third chapter of Rancière’s Disagreement
should be understood as raising a genuine question:
to show that some notion of universal human capacity
can something as minimal as the pleasure of freedom
is required for his account of politics to be cogent. The
really serve as an affective and normative counter to the
stakes of this paper are twofold. There is not only an
dehumanizing, alienating, and nihilistic political character
interpretative question about understanding Rancière,
of modernity?
but also one about the relationship between politics and
humanism.

60 Years of Hannah Arendt’s The Human


Condition: Thinking through and beyond Foucault and Normative Political
Dark Times Philosophy
The University of Sydney

Mary Walsh Paul Patton


University of Canberra University of New South Wales

2018 marks sixty years since the publication of Hannah


In 1971 Rawls published A Theory of Justice, while Foucault
Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). In light of changing
founded a ‘Prisons Information Group’ and began the
political, social and economic circumstances that have
work that led to Discipline and Punish (1975). These
come to the fore with Brexit, the Trump Presidency and
represent two very different philosophical approaches to
the Australian experience of having five prime ministers
politics. One aim of this project is to show how they might
in the previous decade, this paper seeks to illuminate
both be accepted as political philosophy, another is to
upon the relevance of Arendt’s landmark book for
show that they engaged in complementary philosophical
understanding the significance and continuing relevance
approaches to politics. Rawls offers a path to this
of political theory as a discipline for thinking through and
conclusion. His conception of the functions of political
beyond contemporary times from a political perspective.
philosophy included the pursuit of realistic utopianism.
The paper will also draw upon insights from the Hannah
This would develop a conception or conceptions of
Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities 2017
possible future states of political life that would be
Conference titled - Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark
achievable from the present. This relies on a conception
Times and the recently published Artifacts of Thinking:
of the limits of the present. Rawls admits that the
Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017) (eds
determination of such limits is a difficult question beyond
Berkowitz and Storey).
the scope of his enquiries. By contrast, the question of
Page 19

the limits of the present lies at the heart of Foucault’s


conception of political philosophy. His historical studies
are not contributions to public reason proper in Rawls’
sense of the term, but contributions to public political
culture designed to clear a path towards future proposals
that would fall squarely within the sphere of public
reason.

Panel 14: DESPOTISM AND TYRANNY


(Chair Quinlan Bowman)

Analysing Political Deception: The only to institutions. A society enjoys pure republican
Virtues of Bernard Williams’ Anti-Tyranny freedom when every citizen is fully committed to not
interfering arbitrarily with another. The paper also argues
Argument
that the ideal of non-domination is context-insensitive-it
Ben Cross is what it is regardless of time and place. A consequence
Wuhan University of this view is that pure non-domination may be neither
feasible nor desirable in real societies because it conflicts
According to Bernard Williams’ “Anti-Tyranny Argument”, with other values. It is one value in a plurality of values,
it is important for citizens to have access to true and may have to be traded off against other values.
information about the exercise of political power in order
to check the tendency of governments and politicians
to become tyrannous. Although Williams thinks the The Ethics of Political Vandalism
argument is one of the better arguments for the
importance of truthfulness in politics, he acknowledges Ten-Herng Lai
two limitations. First, it appears to offer little more than Australian National University

the truism that tyranny is a bad thing - a truism that will


be accepted by all but tyrants themselves. Second, it Political vandalism, as I shall call it, is the unauthorized
may not offer any reasons for the importance of true defacing, destroying, or removal of political symbols with
information about forms of political power which do not a clear display of political motivation, which expresses
seem tyrannous. I argue that kind of political analysis defiance, dissociation, condemnation, contempt, anger,
required to apply the Anti-Tyranny Argument enables it to or even hatred towards what those symbols stand for. The
overcome both limitations. In so doing, I show that it has aim of this paper is to argue that this type of activity is
a clear advantage over rival arguments for the importance sometimes a permissible reaction against state sponsored
of truthfulness in politics. offensive political symbols - symbols that honor or praise
political figures who are not worth honoring or praising,
or represent ideologies that are oppressive - when those
symbols harm vulnerable minorities in a specific way, that
Completing the Ideal of Non-Domination
is, when they subordinate, exclude, and assault vulnerable
Lars Moen minorities in the name of the people, constantly, and
Australian National University through presuppositions. Political vandalism dissociates
with, flags out and challenges the presuppositions or
People enjoy republican freedom as non-domination authority of, and in the way that matches the constancy
when they are protected against arbitrary interference. of state sponsored offensive political symbols, and thus
But to Philip Pettit, a prominent defender of republican can serve as a counter-speech against this type of state
freedom, the political ideal of non-domination requires expression.
only that institutions do what it is feasible and desirable
that they do in order to prevent domination. The
domination that remains in society lies outside the scope
of political theory, according to Pettit’s political realism.
Pettit also argues that what counts as domination, and
what institutions should do about it, varies from one
society to another. This paper denies both this conceptual
relativism and that the ideal of non-domination applies
Page 20
Governing the Barbarians: Considerations or “barbaric.” In “civilized” contexts, he thinks, liberty
contributes to happiness and to improvement and
of Mill’s Defense of Despotism
maximizes utility. In “barbaric” societies, however,
Quinlan Bowman liberty does not maximize utility; rather, liberty tends to
Nanyang Technological University undermine it. Furthermore, liberty does not contribute to
improvement, and so despotism may be needed to attain
In this paper, I evaluate John Stuart Mill’s claim that it. Having sketched these arguments, I then explore the
“despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing tensions that arise in Mill’s argument due to an analogy he
with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, makes between children and “barbarians.” I conclude that
and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” Mill’s argument for despotism is not adequately justified
To do so, I first sketch Mill’s characterization of three by the terms of his own argument. Indeed, facets of his
principles: the principle of utility, the principle of liberty, argument seem to contradict the utilitarian grounds on
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

and the principle of progress. Crucially, Mill thinks that which he himself wants to stake his ethical claims.
these principles relate to one another in very different
ways, depening on whether the society is “civilized”

Panel 15: FAMILY AND EDUCATION


(Chair Melanie White)

Wollstonecraft’s Legacy for Citizenship But from the late nineteenth century onwards, orthodox
economics began to distinguish its science from ethical
Studies
and philosophical reflection. Familial behaviour became
Melanie White reduced to a function of an individual’s rational choice
UNSW over a set of preferences. The paper’s second stage tracks
this change, and shows that orthodox agnosticism about
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the RIghts the ethical value of preferences cannot be sustained.
of Woman (1792) was published over 200 years ago. From Alfred Marshall’s household economics, through
Nevertheless, her claim that humanity is a status to be the forgotten work of Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt and
earned for both men and women alike has contemporary Margaret Reid, to the New Household Economics of Nobel
relevance for contemporary debates over the role of Prize laureate Gary Becker, the study reveals how ethical
affect and sexuality in citizenship studies. The purpose judgments about families comprise the unacknowledged
of this paper is to consider the legacy of Wollstonecraft’s backdrop of this purportedly neutral economics.
arguments for the present moment.
The study hereby uncovers the important but contested
The University of Sydney

role of the family in society’s self-understanding of its


The Family, Ethics and Economics: An own good.

Unorthodox History
Miriam Bankovsky A Pluralist Account of Educational Justice
La Trobe University
Kristy Macfarlane
For much of the history of Western political and La Trobe University
economic thought, the family was conceptualised as the
origin of the State and the motor of a progress that was In recent decades political philosophers have increasingly
both ethical and economic. This paper briefly illustrates been engaged with the issue of educational justice.
developments in the philosophical understanding of the The importance of education is widely acknowledged
family-state and family-economy nexus, from Aristotle’s in modern liberal democracies. Education brings a
account of “virtuous” household production between range of benefits to both individuals and societies
deficiency and overabundance, to the Christian family’s more broadly, so examining what justice in education
moral role in socialising labour productivity, to the requires is crucial. Nevertheless, there is no consensus
Enlightenment defence of family privacy, property and about how educational justice is best understood or
democratic love as conditions for public participation and pursued. This paper will examine a number of different,
moral individuality. competing conceptions of educational justice. Theorists
Page 21

variously promote the importance of distributive


equality, social equality, sufficiency and priority in the sufficientarian and prioritarian dimensions, and consider
educational context. This paper will argue that while how these different dimensions could work together
many of the existing theories cannot be theoretically in pursuit of educational justice. The paper will argue
justified, elements from each of these ideals are needed that a pluralist account of educational justice is much
if a coherent account of educational justice is to be more appealing and theoretically justifiable than existing
developed. The paper will propose a pluralist account of theories.
educational justice that incorporates various egalitarian,

Panel 16: JUSTICE


(Chair Nicholas Barry)

Responsibility to Remedy Structural fact-dependent at the foundational level. In this paper,


Injustice I critically evaluate Miller’s argument, concluding that
it is ultimately unsuccessful. I argue that the validity
Max Fedoseev of political principles is, at the foundational level,
Australian National University independent of empirical claims. However, this does
not mean that political principles are unable to provide
Who is responsible for remedying structural injustice? guidance when it comes to practical policy issues or
The following distinction is important for answering this questions of institutional design. The paper demonstrates
question. There are two distinct components of structural this by outlining the implications of highly abstract, fact-
injustice. On the one hand, it consists in unjust harm independent luck egalitarian and relational egalitarian
systematically inflicted on individuals. On the other hand, principles for welfare policy.
it consists in the fact that existing social structures are
unjust: they program for the occurrence of unjust harm.
Remedying structural injustice, then, involves two distinct
Equality and Position
tasks: providing relief to unjustly harmed individuals and
transforming unjust social structures. Drawing on Iris Devon Cass
Marion Young’s work, I argue that the responsibility to The Australian National University
carry out the latter task is a special kind of responsibility:
it is owed to society rather than individuals, and the usual So-called ‘positional goods’ such as education and
criteria for assigning responsibility - causal contribution wealth are such that their value depends on how much
to the situation to be remedied, one’s agency in bringing of them others have. Some philosophers claim that
it about, moral fault, and so on - are not applicable. for positional goods there is a kind of extensional
Instead, the responsibility to transform unjust social equivalence between prioritarian, sufficientarian, and
structures is grounded by one’s participation in these egalitarian principles of justice: concern for the worst
social structures. This conclusion has important political off, or all having ‘enough’, may require equality. I argue
implications. It entails that active and politically engaged the significance of this claim depends on whether the
civil society - social movements, NGOs, etc. - is crucial good is ‘partly’ or ‘purely’ positional, and I suggest there
for addressing structural injustice. I will illustrate this are two dimensions that matter for this issue. The first
point by looking at the task of addressing climate change. concerns whether the supply of the good is necessarily
fixed; the second, whether its value is essentially or
only causally dependent on relative position. I argue the
Facts, Principles, and Egalitarian Justice significance of the equivalence thesis is limited for partly
positional goods such as education and wealth because
Nicholas Barry equal distribution is not the only way to benefit the worst
La Trobe University off or give all ‘enough’. Growth and ‘de-positonalization’
are other salient strategies. By contrast, I show that
In recent work, David Miller has advanced a strong case
status (more precisely, what I call ‘citizen-status’) is a
for the fact-dependence of political principles, arguing
purely positional good, and as such, neither growth nor
that whether such principles are valid ultimately depends
de-positionalization is possible. For this reason, the
on certain empirical facts. Miller’s view contrasts with
equivalence thesis is more compelling in this case.
the position adopted by a number of other influential
political theorists, most notably, G.A. Cohen, who
argued that the validity of political principles is not
Page 22
Panel 17: WAR AND VIOLENCE
(Chair Ihab Shalbak)

Morality in War: The Relevance of thus conceived as an indispensable factor in designating


the optimal course of action at the strategic level. In
Intentions to Permissibility in Jus Ad
this paper, I argue that the sort of universalism that
Bellum RAND’s reasoning embodies is only capable of including
by excluding. Although the enemy population becomes
Beba Cibralic
Peking University internal to its logic, it is internalized only as collateral
damage, or human waste. In this framework, while
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

On reexamining jus ad bellum, a number of scholars designations like collateral damage appear factual,
within the Just War tradition have offered compelling neutral and tragically unavoidable, in actuality, they
arguments against the inclusion of the Right Intention designate those who deserve to live and those who are
Criterion. The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate fated to die.
that a revised version of the Right Intention Criterion
ought to remain part of jus ad bellum. In section one, I lay
the analytical groundwork: I outline the Right Intention Collective Traumas as a Force for Political
Criterion, distinguish the three dominant interpretations Activism and Change: Examples from
of ‘intention’ within the context of Just War Theory, and
Tunisia, and Egypt
clarify the ways in which intentions are distinct from
motives and plans. In section two I look beyond the Ahlam AbuKhoti
scope of Just War Theory and examine the spectrum of University of Sydney
conditions under which intentions have no relevance,
minimal relevance, and much relevance to permissibility. The correlation between Trauma and the Political
I then delineate, examine, and ultimately defend two lines has often circled around the ways in which political
of argument endorsing the limited view that an agent’s prosecution, political terror, and political violence
intentions can play a role in the permissibility of an act. resulted in the creation of individual and collective
I return to Just War Theory in section three to assess traumas. My discussion of this correlation looks into
the applicability of this view to jus ad bellum. I conclude the possibilities of reversing the process and moving
with the assertion that a more limited formulation of the from traumas towards political activism and change.
Right Intention Criterion, which I will call the ‘Intentions Jeffrey C. Alexander argued that traumas are not merely
Criterion’, ought to remain a necessary condition of jus ad psychological, they transcend that domain into the
bellum. social realm. In this view, Traumas can be presented
and re-presented in a manner that is closely related to
Antonio Gramsci’s “War of Positions”. This “war” creates
the social and political tensions eventually leading to
RAND Corporation: Decision Making
triggering uprisings, revolutions, and by extension, if
Theoretic and The Uncertainties of
The University of Sydney

possible, political change. Through studying examples


Certain Death from Tunisia, and Egypt, I intend to show how traumas
shared as part of the collective experience may provide
Ihab Shalbak the needed destabilization of political order to bring
University of Sydney
about political change. This will be measured through
This paper examines the contribution of the RAND 1) A quantitative analysis comparing elections and
Corporation to the formation of a distinctive Cold War referendums participation rates, and the foundation
form of reasoning. RAND fashioned military procedures, of political parties. 2) A qualitative examination of the
techniques and technologies of codification, shaped political discourse pre and post revolution/uprising.
by formalistic-statistical reasoning, in order to render
the Cold War order visible and articulable. It was in this
context that “collateral damage”, and a host of related
notions, made their appearance. In the context of a global
geopolitical conflict distinguished by a fierce competition
between two universalist ideologies, both intent on saving
humanity as a whole, RAND’s formulations acquired
an additional humanitarian normative dimension: they
were now conceived as damage-limiting technologies
designed to save civilian lives. The enemy population was
Page 23
The ‘Thingly Power’ of Border Walls: Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘thing-power (vital materiality)’
and Deleuzio-Guttarian ontology of becoming, the paper
Towards Meshwork Thinking in Border
asks to what extent political and ethical debates over
Studies borders might change if we capture the agentic capacity
of walls. This paper concludes that this new form of
Umut Ozguc
Australian National University inquiry may encourage us to see borders as more-than-
human spaces - uneven topographies that radically alter
This paper explores the theoretical, political and ethical encounters between human and non-human bodies.
implications of meshwork thinking in border studies. It
does so by providing a critique of contemporary debates
over assemblages and network thinking in IR. Inspired by

Panel 18: CONCEPTS AND REPRESENTATION


(Chair Thomas Besch)

Representative Claims as Arguments alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends


that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive
Sophie Reid conceptions that favor high discursive purchase. On this
University of Melbourne
basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on
idealization.
This paper considers Saward’s claim-making account of
representation in the light of Habermas’ communicative
ethics. The argument of this paper is twofold. Firstly,
that claims to represent necessarily take the form of Ambiguity and Vagueness in Political
an argument, in that they consist of an assertion with Concepts: On Coding and Referential
supporting evidence. Not all arguments are representative Vacuity
claims, but all representative claims necessarily take
the form of an argument. Secondly and in light of Keith Dowding
this, it will be argued that representative claims can Australian National University

be held up to Habermas’ requirements for sound


arguments. Representative claims should be factually The paper argues that sometimes political dispute
correct, normatively right, and sincerely intended. This over a concept concerns the use of the same term for
suggests a potential approach to normatively assessing ambiguous reference. Ambiguity can be overcome by
individual representative claims as either contributing or demarcating the two different concepts through what
undermining democratic politics, based on whether they Chalmers dubs the subscript gambit. A deeper problem
live up to these requirements. comes about if political terms are vague. We argue that
many political concepts are vague. For vague terms we
can do one of two things. First we can precisify using
the subscript gambit. Here we will have two different
Reciprocity, Idealization, and Discursive
precise terms, each of which provides an interpretation
Purchase of the vague terms. We have simply partitioned the social
universe in different ways, and there might be no right or
Thomas Besch
Wuhan University wrong partition. Second we can eliminate the vague term
for analysis bringing it back at the end of the analysis for
Conceptions of acceptability-based justification reasons of efficiency. When precisifying complex terms
take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes, such as ‘the collective will’ or ‘freedom’ we might find
or contributes to, validity, or justification. There they are incoherent. Evan’s proves that if the world is
is no agreement as to how high or low the bar for precise and there are vague concepts, then there can be
authoritativeness should be set. The paper engages the multiple precisifications, each different but equally valid.
issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for We argue that this is the case for complex vague terms
authoritativeness imparts to a standard of acceptability- in political theory. For analysis we eliminate the vague
based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive concept and use the precisifications that represent the
purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to concept of rival contradictory dimensions, reintroducing
people when it builds on that bar. I observe that (i) the term only where incoherence does not follow in the
Page 24

and (ii) are interdependent. I then distinguish between specific applications of the concept.
Radical Political Realism and Non- varieties have advocated engaging with ‘real politics’ such
sectarian Meta-theory as the of actions, motives, etc., of politicians, there has
been little consideration in radical realism of its relation
Gearóid Brinn to the history of radical political theory or the ‘real radical
University of Melbourne politics’ of contemporary grassroots activism, theory, and
street politics. This paper will contend that there is value
The recent revival of realism in anglophone political
to the radical realist project in considering such issues,
philosophy has included efforts to challenge realism’s
and will argue the case for an appropriate approach for
conservative reputation and advance a radical form.
doing so.
However, this ‘new’ realism has also been criticised as
overly abstract and philosophical. While liberal realist
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

Panel 19: INEQUALITY


(Chair Annette Maguire)

Elite Hegemony in Australia: a Neo- Economic Foundations of Inalienable


Gramscian Typology Rights
Sanjay Ramesh José-Miguel Bello y Villarino
University of Sydney University of Sydney / MFAC Spain

The neoliberal global political economy was established A review of the legal literature, starting from as early as
in the 1980s and its principal motive was to abolish the the 16th century with Francisco de Vitoria and arriving
welfare state, which evolved from the ashes of the second to philosophers of our days, shows a continuous quest
World War and was influenced and embedded by the for the foundations of the rights on which the essence
social economics of John Maynard Keynes. The welfare of human life relies. The aim of this paper is to create a
state that Keynes advocated came under increasing different avenue altoghether in that debate.
pressure from the free market proponents who argued
against state intervention in market situations. The This essay replies mainly to the “cultural relativist”
neoliberal discourses which emerged were based on critique . As the objection is typically articulated, there is
three pillars of scientific and free market principles: no possibility to find “universal” rights because the law is
deregulation, managerialism and instrumentalism based created within a society which may not share the values of
on the primacy of scientific knowledge and these were any other society. Like others, I disagree. I will try to show
supported by the rational choice theory where individual in the following pages that any economically-rational
human being would like to live in a society that guarantees
The University of Sydney

pursuits for self enrichment instead of the collective


welfare of the disadvantage and the vulnerable. Small some rights regardless of any alternative offered. I also
group of the powerful and the rich defined the political consider that my reasoning overcomes any possible
economic discourse and utilised neoliberal institutions libertarian critique for as much as this choice is the
such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, result of a selfish individual choice and not restricted by
and free trade regimes to craft political hegemony. The any external imposition. It could be seen as an evolution
article will explore neoliberal ideology and argue that the of existing post-Rawlsian theories (as it relies on a
international systems were used to subordinate workers modified idea of the veil of ignorance), and presents some
and poorer countries of the world, forced to operate similarities to Dworkin’s insurance scheme, although its
within the terms imposed by hegemonic entities. basic element is the assumption of a selfish philosopher
Homo economicus

Moreover, this presentation supports the claim of the


inadequacy of the traditional distinction between civil and
political rights on the one hand and economic, social and
cultural rights on the other hand. Following the reasoning
of this paper rationally chosen inalienable rights may fall
in any of the two previous categories, whereas some of
the rights traditionally listed in both cannot be considered
Page 25

inalienable rights from an economic perspective.


Gendered Violence & Feminised Reshoring and Partiality: The Social
Resistance in the Age of Empire Relations of Globalisation and
Technological Innovation
Annette Maguire
University of Newcastle
Mark Howard
Monash University
Recent years have seen the social epidemic of gendered
violence has risen up the Australian political agenda. This Trump promises to “bring home” manufacturing, and with
is attested by the recent Royal Commission in Victoria, it, production labour and capital; however, his focus on
and greater prominence of the issue in the public sphere. the effects of “offshore” labour on American workers
However, the problem of gendered violence is most often overlooks the effect of technological innovation on the
portrayed in the public sphere as a matter for law and future of employment. Technological displacement of
order, rather than a crucial social justice issue. Rarely is work is already happening in the U.S., and coercing an
it placed within its rightful context - namely the neo- accelerated program of “reshoring” is likely to exaggerate
liberal social order that I name Empire (after Hardt & technological adoption. This poses the question: If the
Negri, 2000) that prevails in Australia and internationally, aim of new industrial and trade policy is to address
and which has marked detrimental consequences for the decaying social relations of production through
gender equality. Extensive literature indicates that gender targeted employment, should the government regulate
inequality is the prime factor in predicting higher rates of the displacement of labour through technical innovation
gender violence. in the same way it plans to contain globalisation? In
answering this question, I argue that a symmetry exists
This paper aims to sketch out the missing context, in the normative significance of workplace automation
firstly by undertaking a political economy analysis of the and the use of foreign labour: as social phenomena they
disproportionate impacts of the neo-liberal order on appear morally equivalent. Therefore, delivering the
women. In doing so, it uncovers the nexus that troubles anticipated social benefits of reshoring to the “right”
women’s lives: a nexus formed by growing precarity people will require government intervention-an anathema
and the over-stretch of unpaid caring work. The paper to libertarians-into the rapid technological advances
identifies the way in which the age of Empire entails an in industry. I conclude that a progressive re-imagining
anti-feminist backlash that seeks to sideline women in the of the relation of society, technology, work and wealth
public sphere. With this conceptual framework, gender is required, and that the implications of reshoring are
violence can be properly understood as a continuum, radical for the social relations of production, requiring
where the silencing of women’s voices in the public the democratising of the ownership of technology.
sphere, and pervasive Othering discourses directed at
women, play a decisive enabling role. Finally, the paper
foregrounds contemporary feminised social movements
in the Spanish-speaking world, in which women are
reclaiming public space to boldly challenge the norms
& causes of gender violence, and empower women’s
resistance & self-determination.

Panel 20: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND


COSMOPOLITANISM
(Chair Duncan Stuart)

Cosmopolitanism and the Foreigner cosmopolitanism is therefore neither a deontologist nor a


consequentialist, but an ethical situationalist. Rather than
Li-chia Lo a “worldwide community of human beings” in Nussbaum’s
University of Melbourne words, the cosmopolitan community is a community of
strangers.
By engaging in the works of Kristeva, Derrida, and Honig,
this paper approaches cosmopolitanism from the idea Cosmopolitanism has undergone waves of developments
of the foreigner and argues that cosmopolitanism is from its Stoic origin and Kant’s classic elaboration to its
an ethico-political project defined by the encounter latest debate along with the discussions of globalization.
Page 26

of foreigners in its first place. The ethical subject of


Among various discussions of cosmopolitanism, the Republican Global Governance
foreigner is always the hidden topic. As cosmopolitanism
is founded on the universal humanity, every discussion Steven Slaughter
tends to neutralize the image of the foreigner. A world Deakin University

of strangers is replaced by the world of universal human


beings that every individual has equal responsibility to This paper considers the global dimensions of neo-roman
each other. republicanism by considering Phillip Pettit’s account of
globalised sovereignty. However, this paper contends that
This mainstream view is what I try to negotiate, and I the conventional focus on the international dimensions of
attempt to highlight the fact that encountering foreigners the republican state and on international institutions and
in our global mobility has become common on the daily policy understates important questions about the type
basis. This paper will investigate the issue of foreigners of citizenship required by republicanism and the types of
2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference

and nationalism, the idea of hospitality, and the image of transnational civil society and policy activity required to
the foreign-founders. support these institutions and moderate contemporary
forms of domination. As such, it contends that a wider
consideration of different types of citizenship and
governance is required to developed by republicanism in
the contemporary context of globalisation. This paper first
outlines Pettit’s account of republicanism and globalised
sovereignty, then it outlines prominent alternatives to
Pettit’s account, and then lastly outlines the various forms
of citizenship and governance required to support global
governance and support republican politics.

Panel 21: AUTHOR MEETS READERS 2


(Chair Nicholas Barry)

Panel on Daniel Halliday, The Inheritance slow to engage with the moral issues at stake in these
debates. Daniel Halliday’s new book, The Inheritance
of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right
of Wealth corrects this gap in the literature, providing
to Bequeath (Oxford 2018) a systematic philosophical examination of the moral
foundations of the right to bequeath wealth, and the
Commentators:
Nicholas Barry (La Trobe University) legitimacy of inheritance taxes. Throughout the book,
Luara Ferracioli (The University of Sydney/University of Halliday engages with historical work on inheritance
Amsterdam)
The University of Sydney

and recent theories of distributive justice. He ultimately


Stewart Braun
Daniel Halliday (University of Melbourne) concludes that unrestricted inheritance is unjust to the
extent that it enables and enhances the intergenerational
Whether inequalities in the distribution of inherited replication of inequality, endorsing a hybrid of the luck
wealth are morally concerning and whether they should egalitarian and social egalitarian approaches. In this
be taxed, are issues of long-standing political contention. author meets critics session, three interlocutors will
In recent times they have returned to the forefront of engage with the themes and arguments developed in The
the political agenda as a result of work by Thomas Piketty Inheritance of Wealth, with responses from the author,
and others that has drawn attention to the economic followed by a general discussion of inheritance taxation
consequences of growing inequalities in wealth, however, and the right to bequest.
contemporary political philosophers have been relatively
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2nd Australian Political Theory and Philosophy Conference
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