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Research Students (Political Theory)
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Aslan Amani
Is Democratic Multiculturalism Really Possible?: Democracy is, perhaps, the most unquestionable characteristic of the Western political landscape. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, has been one of the most discussed topics of the past two decades. Yet political theorists writing on the justice of multiculturalism demands have overlooked implications of democratic theory for the debate. This dissertation argues that assessing the normative interplay of democratic theory with multiculturalist principles can improve our existing theories of citizenship. The dissertation is organized into three parts. In the first part I develop a framework for studying the normative interplay of democratic theory and multiculturalism. I draw attention to the multidimensional nature of democratic legitimacy often overlooked in democratic theory and the presence of different multicultural contexts, expectations and principles. In the second part I juxtapose normative requirements of democracy with various multiculturalist principles identified in the first part. Part III brings together lessons from the analyses of individual dimensions of democratic legitimacy vis-à-vis circumstances of multiculturalism and goes on to provide a comprehensive answer to the guiding question of the dissertation – Is Democratic Multiculturalism Really Possible?
Supervisor: Professor Chandran Kukathas
|Contact: a.amani@lse.ac.uk|
Personal Website: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/amani/|
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Cian Bryan
Supervisor: Professor Chandran Kukathas
|Contact: c.m.bryan@lse.ac.uk|
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Katy Dineen
Supervisor: Dr Katrin Flikschuh|
Contact: k.dineen@lse.ac.uk|
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Edward Hall
Bernard Williams and Postmoralist Political Philosophy: Much contemporary political philosophy is moralistic and, as Jeremy Waldron notes, proceeds with an 'I expect you'd all like to know what I would do if I ruled the world' methodology. It does so because it believes that the task of political philosophy is to redesign political life according to a moral prospectus. However, in recent years a countermovement has been growing. Drawing on the work of historical figures including Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Weber, and Berlin, a number of political theorists and philosophers, recently labelled "realists", have claimed that the moralistic approach is mistakenly abstract and idealistic. In particular they claim that it fails to adequately reflect on the true nature of the relationship between moral and political philosophy, and how these domains are to be distinguished. My thesis intends to perform the first in depth analysis of one of the major protagonists in these debates, the late British philosopher Bernard Williams, whose work is a philosophically sophisticated example of these concerns. I will do so by setting out the relations between Williams's work in ethics and his political writings and examining his realism in relation to the work of political moralists including Rawls, Dworkin, Nagel and G.A. Cohen. I intend to take a definitive stance on what constraints this "realist" (or to use my preferred term postmoralist) approach can legitimately impose on the normative pretensions of political philosophy by focusing on the naturalistic and historicised conception of liberalism Williams develops.
Supervisor: Professor Paul Kelly|
Contact: e.hall@lse.ac.uk|
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David Jenkins
The Value of Effort: It is the aim of this paper to precisely elucidate what is of value in effort and to conceptualise for it a place within an egalitarian account of justice. Contemporary accounts of effort have been interesting if a little thin on the ground and more often than not, locked within a particularly distributivist account of social justice. Consequently, effort needs to be elucidated outside of this paradigm and separate from the current conceptions and theoretical uses which seem to concentrate too heavily on questions of justified inequality and desert. Alongside and supportive of this investigation, an account of autonomy will be drawn on that more precisely elucidates the notion of 'autonomously chosen effort' (Roemer). This will be an attempt to move discussion of autonomy away from certain images of autonomy as independence from interference and toward a more relational, dependence-oriented view. Additionally, it will be demanded alongside this account of autonomy that individuals are entitled to a presence in the collective decisions of a society, particularly in regard to those deliberations that are concerned with deciding the value of work and in the democratisation of society's division of labour. Control of the environment within which life plans are to take place is an essential part of the project of autonomy and, furthermore, in relation to the expenditure of effort that we demand of ourselves and each other.
Supervisor: Professor Anne Phillips
|Contact: d.j.jenkins@lse.ac.uk|
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Yonathan Reshef
Justice, Children, and the Family: Love, care and warmth are amongst the first things that come to our Western minds when we think of family virtues. This thesis argues that justice is a fundamental, although somewhat hidden, virtue of families and thus aims at exploring its requirements in parents-child relationships. Drawing on the peculiar features of the family as a distinctive context of interpersonal relationships the thesis develops a contextualist account of family justice and then tries to link it back to the wider issue of social justice. The account of family justice advanced in the thesis complements and, to some extent, serves as an alternative to other theoretical approaches for tackling this issue, which either focus on children's moral rights or treat the family mainly as part of the basic structure of society to which principles of social justice apply as a whole.
Supervisor: Professor Chandran Kukathas
|Contact: y.reshef@lse.ac.uk|
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Rikke Wagner
Citizenship, migration and mobility: Today’s Europe is marked by increasing mobility of persons across political borders. Migrants from all over the world arrive in search of refuge, work, adventure or family life. At the same time, EU-integration has made it easier for citizens to move and settle anywhere in the European Union. In my thesis I explore what this means for our understanding of citizenship. Classical conceptions of the citizen take as their starting point bounded political communities where we know who the people are and what rights they have. But when borders become porous and civil rights are claimed and reinterpreted by migrants, these models are challenged. In the thesis I argue that contemporary theories of deliberative and agonistic democracy offer more promising ways of understanding citizenship in an age of migration. But these new conceptualizations stand in need of further theoretical development in order to fully make sense of border crossing and citizenship in contemporary Europe.
Supervisors: Professor Anne Phillips| & Dr Jonathan White| (European Institute)
Contact: r.wagner@lse.ac.uk|
Website: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/wagnerr1/|
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Marta Wojciechowska
Supervisor: Professor Christian List
|Contact: m.wojciechowska@lse.ac.uk|
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Baldwin Wong
Social Contract: its Methodology, and its justifactory power - A critical study of contemporary social contract theories: My thesis is a project which aims at examining social contract as a method of justification. In the contemporary social contract theories, contractarians share a 'constructivist' methodology, that constructs fundamental political principles from a hypothetical procedure which imitates our practical reasoning, but they disagree on what practical reasons are involved in the hypothetical procedure. In general, there are three views: Interest is the overriding reason, Reasonableness (mutual respect each other as a moral agent) is the overriding reason, Both interest and reasonableness are important reason, neither can consistently override each other. Based on these different assumption of practical reason, contractarians develop different social contract models. Based on (1), some contractarians, like Gauthier, argue that a justified principle should represent a mutual advantageous agreement. Based on (2), some contractarians, like Scanlon, argue that a justified principle should represent an agreement which could not be reasonably rejected. Based on (3), some contractarians, like Rawls, argue that a justified principle should be an agreement which is both not reasonably rejected and advantageous. In this thesis I would like to defend two propositions. If both of these two propositions is true, then all of these three views are problematic. First, I would like to argue that both self-interest and reasonableness are strong reasons to human being and neither of them can be easily ignored. If it is right, then the Gauthierian and Scanlonian contract are problematic since both of them require us to ignore reason which has strong motivational power. Secondly, I would like to argue that, due to their different nature, self-interest and reasonableness are irreconcilable with each other. They will always lead to different conclusion. Therefore, the Rawlsian contract is problematic because it intends to reconcile two kinds of agreement which are incompatible with each other. These two propositions show a paradox which is implicit in the 'constructivist' methodology. No matter how contractarians construct their social contract models, their models will still have to face this paradox.
Supervisor: Professor Chandran Kukathas
|Contact: b.w.wong@lse.ac.uk|
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James K L Wong
Green Visions, Democratic Constraints: The Possibility and Design of Democratic Institutions for Environmental Decision-making: This research deals with the relationship of two pressing ideas in the contemporary world – democracy and the environment. It aims at constructing a formal model of democratic institutions for collective environmental decision-making from the perspective of formal political theory. Using the celebrated axiomatic approach, I propose a dilemma of green democracy which highlights the logical constraints of any environmental-democratic institutions, and discuss several escape routes from the dilemma. The first upshot is that environmental-democratic institutions are logically possible only if the idea of green democracy is reformulated according to one of these escape routes. Then, I consider several issues in designing environmental-democratic institutions, including deliberation and the discursive dilemma, distributed cognition and the reconciliation of technocracy and democracy, as well as cognitive dissonance and the epistemic quality of environmental decisions. The second upshot is that, through the lenses of social choice theory, it is possible to design environmental-democratic institutions which are attractive in terms of both procedure and outcome.
The contributions of this research are twofold: (1) The dilemma of green democracy realigns the theoretical debates about the relationship between democracy and the environment; and (2) the research in its continuity demonstrates a methodological innovation in applying formal political theory to normative discussions of environmental policy issues.
Supervisors: Professor Christian List |&Dr. Katrin Flikschuh |& Dr. Kai Spiekermann
|Contact: j.k.wong@lse.ac.uk|
Personal Website: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/wongj|
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