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Should I Be Proud of Liberalism with Excellence? On the Collective Grounds of Self-Respect

Should I Be Proud of Liberalism with Excellence? On the Collective Grounds of Self-Respect Abstract In Liberalism with Excellence Kramer offers an account of liberalism that gets at something liberal philosophy often overlooks: the crucial importance for individuals of the success of their groups. According to Kramer, Rawlsian liberals acknowledge the importance to a just society of individuals enjoying warranted self-respect, but they overlook the fact that such warranted self-respect can be promoted by the state investing in the excellence of the society to which the individuals belong. In particular, warranted individual self-respect can be bolstered by one's society's achieving excellence, including through the exceptional artistic, sporting and other achievements of some of its individual members. Therefore, not only perfectionists who already think it is the state's role to promote valuable modes of living, but also Rawlsian liberals should expect the state to be in the business of investing in exceptional human achievements. In the article, I examine the core idea, on which the argument relies, that individual warranted self-respect can be promoted by the state through the promotion of the excellence of one’s society. I identify mechanisms through which individuals' warranted self-respect and society's excellence can stand in such a relationship. I argue that Kramer’s own account does not offer enough details for us to be able to judge whether it succeeds, and I suggest a possible direction in which the argument could be developed. I. Introduction In Liberalism with Excellence Matthew Kramer offers an account of liberalism that gets at something liberal philosophy often overlooks: the crucial importance for individuals of the success of their groups.1 He argues that the idea can be made coherent with two positions that have been developed in opposition to one another. The first position is that of Rawlsian liberalism.2 According to this view, where constitutional essentials are concerned, the state’s action cannot be justified with reference to the fact that it may promote values, projects, activities or modes of living aimed at the pursuit and achievement of the good life. In other words, justifications for state activity that concerns constitutional essentials should be confined to the advancement and honouring of justice. According to perfectionism, by contrast, the state can deliberately promote values, projects, activities and modes of living aimed at the good life; it can promote conceptions of the good. Kramer is a perfectionist. He argues that the state should invest in the success of the groups to which its citizens belong and that it can do so by promoting excellence in human achievements. This bolsters a variety of conceptions of the good, including those that value specific forms of such excellence. But Kramer argues that this is compatible with the Rawlsian liberal project. How? Because the excellence of one’s society or the achievements of outstanding individuals in one’s society bolsters the warranted self-respect of those who belong to the society. And, as Rawls sets it out, justice requires that individuals have a warranted sense of self-respect. In what follows, my focus is not on whether Kramer succeeds in co-opting Rawls to his project—and, by extension possibly also other political liberals such as Quong3—but on the idea, on which the argument relies, that individual warranted self-respect can be promoted by the state through the promotion of the excellence of the society to which the individuals whose self-respect is at stake belong. I will try to identify the mechanisms through which individuals’ self-respect and society can stand in such a relationship. I will suggest a possible direction in which the argument could be developed but will argue that currently Kramer’s account does not offer us enough detail to be able to judge if his argument can succeed. II. The Distinctiveness of Kramer’s Aspirational Perfectionism In Liberalism with Excellence Kramer’s account of the Rawlsian grounding of perfectionism is limited to the case of what he calls aspirational perfectionism. Aspirational perfectionism is distinguished by Kramer from edificatory perfectionism. What Kramer calls edificatory perfectionism focuses on “elevating” the “lifestyle or sensibilities” of each person. It aims for individuals to be able to live by better conceptions of the good. By contrast, aspirational perfectionism forgoes the former and instead “tries to endow a society with estimableness on which the warranted self-respect of every member of the society can be partly based.” How might aspirational perfectionism be grounded in Rawlsian ideas? Kramer offers the following strategy. First, he points out that Rawlsian justice requires, as one of its central demands, high warranted self-respect [WSR]. Second, except perhaps for a few towering geniuses (Kramer offers the example of Shakespeare), high WSR requires societal excellence, which can—and should—take various forms: social justice, outstanding achievements in arts, athletics, science, etc. Such societal excellence can be promoted by the state, for example through targeted subsidies. Since justice requires high WSR, justice requires the state to promote societal excellence including promoting outstanding achievements. As Kramer puts it, “[f]ostering of excellent achievements is properly one of the major roles of a system of governance.”4 In what follows I will most closely examine the claim that high WSR requires societal excellence. First, however, let me say a bit more about the idea that justice requires that WSR be high. III. Does Justice Require Warrantedness for High Self-Respect? What is self-respect? Kramer puts it in Darwallian as well as Rawlsian terms. Having self-respect involves (1) self-regarding appraisal respect (that is, acknowledgement of one’s character and achievements), and (2) recognition respect (acknowledgement of one’s moral standing).5 This means one needs to have confidence in one’s conception of the good, one’s chosen path in life, and confidence that one has the ability to pull it off, and also confidence that one has a moral standing to be treated by others as a bearer of conceptions of the good. Kramer refers in the discussion to self-respect as pride. I want to put aside the question of whether this is in line with Rawls’s views (it may be) or even whether we might use the idea of pride differently to that of self-respect more broadly. I will grant it that self-respect can be thought of as pride. Still, we face the question of whether justice really requires that the warranted self-respect be “ample” and at a “high level”?6 The claim that it needs to be “robust” or solid”—also made by Kramer7—seems more plausible. Why isn’t it enough that a person’s WSR is merely high enough to have a just life? Income and wealth, after all, need not be ample, for Rawls, they need merely suffice for justice. Why does it matter? Because if merely solid self-respect is sufficient, then perhaps the state need not promote that much outstanding individual achievements, if any, for the sake of individuals’ self-respect. That said, I accept that it is difficult to rule on just how high self-respect needs to be in order to serve justice, so in what follows I will grant for the sake of argument that it needs to be high. IV. The Collective Grounds for Warranted Self-Respect Let me focus, then, on the core idea that high WSR requires societal excellence. According to Kramer, people “are warranted … in feeling a heightened sense of self-esteem through the eminence of the community to which they belong.”8 In fact, for ordinary individuals who are not like Shakespeare, the excellence of “[one’s] … society” is a necessary condition (though not a sufficient one) “for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect.”9 We need to ask, then, through which mechanism social eminence can bear on one’s WSR. Here Kramer seems to identify two core possibilities: personal contribution and associating oneself with one’s society’s excellence. A. Personal Contribution One can personally contribute to society’s excellence—understood to include achievements such as justice but also outstanding achievements of its individual members—in a causal sense. One can contribute, for example, through one’s contribution to general taxation that is used to fund investment in outstanding individuals.10 If one personally contributes to the excellence of society, then the idea that society’s excellence bears on one’s WSR is not hard to grasp. Nonetheless, we can confront this thought with Dworkin’s skepticism about the potential of one’s personal contribution to bear on the value of one’s life. Focusing on the value of the impact of one’s life on the world, Dworkin writes, [I]f we measure a life’s value by its consequence, all but a few lives would have no value, and the great value of some other lives—a carpenter who pounded nails into a playhouse on the Thames—would be only accidental. On any plausible view of what is truly wonderful in almost any human life, impact hardly comes into the story at all.11 If we focus on what makes life “truly wonderful,” Dworkin has a point. If we focus on what can bestow warranted self-respect, we may be less sure: the nails need to be pounded into theatres and shops, the streets need to be cleaned, maybe even essays need to be examined. These contributions to society’s excellence may fall short of making one’s life “truly wonderful” but perhaps people can derive warranted self-respect from small contributions of this type. I will return to this problem—the problem of whether one’s typical personal contribution to societal excellence gives grounds for warranted self-respect—once have I outlined my proposal for the collective grounding of warranted self-respect below. B. One’s Association with the Excellence in One’s Society The second mechanism that Kramer’s writings can be interpreted as suggesting is one’s association with the excellence in one’s society. Kramer highlights the distinctiveness of this mechanism when he emphasizes that people are not thereby “personally responsible for the greatness with which they associate themselves.”12 The fact that no personal contribution is needed for this mechanism is also revealed when we are given an example of deriving self-respect from the fact that one’s region has an impressive mountain range. It is hard to imagine that most people personally contribute in any way to this fact. A more familiar example, also offered by Kramer, is that of a sports supporter who may feel warranted pride when her team wins, even if she makes no financial or other contribution to the effort. This type of warranted self-respect is vicarious (and there can also be vicarious shame).13 Anticipating worries about the moral permissibility of “vicarious pride,”14 Kramer argues for its possibility and moral permissibility by pointing out that appropriate vicarious pride is “separable … from any malign attitudes toward others,” need not involve taking credit for “the exploits of others,” need not amount to a display “of a person’s inadequacy” (whereby we feel vicarious pride to compensate for personal insufficiencies). Rather, “[someone] can simply be recognizing that the trajectory of his life comprises far more than solely his own doings. It also comprehends many of the doings of people who stand in sundry relationships to [him].” The success of others can “augment the luster of his life.”15 There are two key ideas here. First, postulating the mechanism involves the recognition that something beyond one’s “own doings” can “augment the luster” of one’s life. Second, Kramer makes a claim about “sundry relationships.” The first idea strikes me as undeniably correct—successes of others can augment the lustre of one’s life. However, this idea seems too broad to ground self-respect or vicarious pride. My life goes better when my partner does not cheat on me. Obama’s life goes better if the US health system is not destroyed and goes worse because Trump has been elected (showing that no virtues except unwavering insistence on one’s qualities, perhaps, are necessary to succeed at this). But while these things make one’s life go better or worse they need not necessarily bear on warranted self-respect (or shame). So the work needs to be done by the idea of the “sundry relationships” to link the individual whose self-respect is at stake to the excellence she did not personally produce. Which relationships qualify? At some point, in later passages, Kramer also talks of a significant association.16 What type would qualify as “significant”? One example offered by Kramer is that of “typical families.” The goodness of one’s life depends on how well the lives of other members of one’s family go. Another, of course, is that of one’s society. When it comes to the latter, “diverse activities cumulatively determine the character of their group to which they all are linked.”17 “Their conduct cumulatively shapes the ethical character of their society.”18 He adds, “[e]very generally law-abiding person who belongs to a society governed by a liberal-democratic regime can warrantedly take pride in those workings.”19 To add precision to the discussion, let me distinguish between various ways of association (in addition to that of personal responsibility, which falls under mechanism one postulated above and so is to be put aside): (a) collective responsibility, (b) membership, (c), endorsing the values represented by the case in question. C. Collective Responsibility Kramer is explicit in the text that he is interested in collective responsibility.20 The difficulty for assessing whether it can play the role it needs is that he does not give us an account of how he understands it. The reference to the law-abiding person in the quotation reported above (the “law-abiding person” who “warrantedly” takes pride in the ethical character of society) may perhaps be read as suggesting that self-respect on the basis of the achievement of one’s society should track one’s support for the achievements of the outstanding individuals who belong there, or at least for the society. What would count as “support”? Elsewhere Kramer emphasizes that even someone who is fighting the injustice of one’s society is to be associated with the injustice. He suggests that the impact on one’s WSR of living in an unjust regime is “independent of her supportiveness or unsupportiveness of the tyrannical regime.”21 He argues that: “Even when somebody fiercely dissociates himself from the society to which he belongs, the trajectory of his life … will have been inflected” by what the society does.22 In other words, but with the help of Kramer’s own example, shame for the injustice of one’s society is warranted even if you are Havel in Czechoslovakia: “the conditions for the full warrantedness of a robust sense of self-respect on his part … were not in place.”23 All this suggests that the idea of supporting the achievements of the society should perhaps be understood in terms of a purely causal involvement, irrespective of one’s attitudes or intentions. Perhaps even the most vocal dissenter is still causally involved when, for example, he buys food and participates in the market. But imagine someone who is like Ghandi or Mandela or Vaclav Havel or Lech Wałęsa and suppose that despite their best efforts they were unsuccessful (so, maybe, a better image is that of dissenters in North Korea). Are they really to be seen as associated with the injustice? They did buy food and their actions created employment opportunities for prison guards. But, to me, their association with the injustice, if any, seems insufficient to count them as part of the relevant collective achievement of injustice in a way that should generate self-shame. Let me be more precise. I do not want to dispute that they may feel less self-respect if they failed than they are warranted in feeling when they succeeded. But I am disputing that they should feel shame. My broader point here is that it is even unclear what one should be seen as being causally involved in. This difficulty is obscured by the fact that in typical philosophical examples illustrating the need for the concept of collective responsibility, the problem of whether someone should be associated with one end or another does not arise since there is just one end to consider. Think for example of Parfit’s torturer’s union—the hypothetical scenario in which 1000 separate and separated individuals independently press 1000 buttons that, each, carry imperceptible electric charges dispersed among 1000 victims who feel enormous pain as 1000 imperceptible charges join together.24 Here there is just one activity and one possible result of participation there. Similarly, when Rawls—whom Kramer quotes—talks about collective responsibility, it is responsibility for the good of a just society under conditions of full compliance. We are all working in such a society towards justice.25 But of course societies achieve a variety of things, many of which cancel each other out and where each person’s alignment with a given end may be complicated. For a concrete example, consider this case. There was some limited active resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1940s (think, for example, of Sophie Scholl) but the problem is that this was done against the society rather than because of it. I do not mean that the majority was actively supporting the Nazis but that they were, at most, passively resisting and many did not do even that. Given this, it is not clear that those who did not actively resist could claim warranted self-respect on the grounds of any sufficient association with those who did. And similarly, it is not clear that those who did actively resist throughout are sufficiently associated with the Nazi regime to feel warranted shame at what it did. The difficulty for any account of collective responsibility is that it (1) cannot demand that each individual involvement in the collective outcome be a net contribution to that outcome—this would miss out on too many forms in which individuals are involved. But, at the same time, it also (2) cannot assume that any involvement in the group makes one collectively responsible with others for everything the group does. There may well be a successful way of navigating this terrain (many have tried) but even if Kramer were to adopt one of those, it is, in fact, unlikely to establish the grounds for a purely vicarious pride and one that grounds pride of all members of society. I suspect that any successful account of collective responsibility will have to rely on some reasonably foreseeable net contribution to the outcome or acting the same way as those who did offer such a net contribution. And this means that societal excellence—and in particular excellence achieved through the successes of outstanding individuals—would offer warranted self-respect to many fewer people than I take Kramer to suggest. D. Membership To remedy the problem of the narrow scope of the reach of the idea of collective responsibility for the achievements of outstanding individuals, we could adopt instead a principle that sees mere membership of the group, for example, citizenship, as sufficient for a significant association. But obviously this would re-introduce some of the other problems mentioned above. Let me, therefore, explore a further possibility instead. E. Endorsing the Values Represented by the Achievement We could try to avoid the above mentioned difficulties by cashing out “significant association” as “endorsement” of the association or in particular of the excellence in question. On this view, one associates oneself by endorsing the things one values (which in most cases means simply that one associates oneself by valuing). That is, it is not clear that we can take warranted vicarious pride in all the achievements we value. We can take pride in valuing them if they are valuable but not in them per se. Drawing warranted self-respect out of such an association would mean gaining warranted self-respect too easily. Suppose my sister (who is not a political theorist and lives in Warsaw and so does not belong to any of Kramer’s associations) has read and values Kramer’s book. Unless she claimed increased self-respect on account of her and his common humanity, I do not think that mere valuing of Kramer’s book would warrant increased self-respect for her here. V. Significant Association We are now in a position to ask and answer the question of what do we want from our account of a significant association. Such an account needs to meet: The particularity criterion. Needs to tie individuals to particular achievements, not just to a group, thereby making it possible that warranted self-respect of someone who is a member of a group is not affected by everything the group does. (cf. Sophie Scholl) The wide reach criterion. Needs to tie individuals to particular achievements in a way that does not presuppose personal responsibility for the achievement. (cf. Football fan) The anti-narcissism (and anti-self-flagellation) criterion. Needs to tie individuals to particular achievements in a way that does not allow them to over-claim (cf. My sister and Kramer’s book) Let me briefly sketch out possible ways out of the difficulty. One tempting (but ultimately misguided) proposal might be Proposal 1: WSR can be grounded in a project/achievement you value provided you are causally involved in the society that helped the achievement/project. The proposal meets the wide reach criterion. It meets the particular achievement criterion. If Sophie Scholl said she did not value Germany’s actions during the war, but did value active resistance she would be appropriately tied only to the achievements of the active resistance. But the proposal fails to meet the anti-narcissism criterion. The fact that the person needs to be causally involved in a given society takes care of some instances of narcissism (such as my sister’s) but does not take care of others. If a British friend of mine who campaigned against public funding for Universities claimed she feels her warranted self-respect can increase because of Kramer’s book, she would be over-claiming. She values the book, but she is over-claiming, nonetheless, because her actions were aimed at making it harder for Kramer to be productive. This only reveals the strangeness of the idea that one can gain warranted self-respect on the basis of a project to which one is causally tied merely through one’s society. But we can satisfy the anti-narcissism criterion differently (without falling foul of the wide range criterion). It is not enough that you value something and not necessary that you are causally involved in the particular achievement. The typical football fan is of course causally involved but even if she never paid for any tickets or otherwise tangibly contributed to the team’s success she would be warranted to feel pride when they did well if she religiously followed the team’s results, told everyone she supports Oxford United, and decorated her house in blue and yellow. One needs to not merely value something but invest oneself into the value or the enactment of the value. Most often this takes the form of personal net contribution to the value. But sometimes it takes the form of expressing the values through one’s identity or through otherwise respecting the value.26 This idea of investing into value via one’s identity is Dworkinian, and may well be Kramerian too. Dworkin even, helpfully, can be thought to link it to self-respect: one of the responsibilities involved in discharging one’s ethical obligation to live well, which we need for self-respect, is to affirm oneself as an expression of what is of value.27 There are limits on what I can make myself an expression of that I will leave unexplored except to say that my capacities may constrain me: if I cannot learn Chinese, I cannot build an identity around the Chinese language. So this is not to deny that it may be hard, and sometimes impossible, to identify with some achievements of cultures one was not born into. Though even then it is usually possible to invest in some other way in the enactment of the value. Proposal 2: WSR can be grounded in how the enactments of the value I invested in (including through my identity) fare in a reasonably foreseeable way. For illustration, let me return to the carpenter sticking a nail into The Globe. Someone who stuck a nail in but did not value theatre, could not claim warranted self-respect for Shakespeare’s successes there: a nail is not enough. The intuitiveness of the thought that even a mere nail or small tax contribution ground WSR in my view resides in this route, not in the personal responsibility one. What does the pride attach to here? There is clearly warranted pride in having located your investment well, in the right values. So we can easily say that you can be proud of that. But, in addition, I think that we can also say that I am proud of the achievement itself if the achievement was a reasonably foreseeable outcome of the instantiation of value I invested in. To make it more concrete, suppose someone does support Oxford United—because they enact the special value of camaraderie, sport, competitiveness and Oxford. If the team smashes up a hotel, they should feel warranted shame for this is a reasonably foreseeable outcome of being an English football team that, by assumption, is being invested in here. If the team throws racist abuse at passers by in town, they need not feel it since overt displays or violently racist conduct has been largely stamped out of English football. It is also possible to invest oneself in the value of a magnificent mountain range by learning about it, organizing exhibitions about it, photographing it, etc. and feel pride on account of the mountain range winning the best mountain range competition. On my account, should the range be destroyed by entities you do not identify or invest yourself into, shame would not be warranted. What would this proposal allow us to say about Sophie Scholl and other dissenters in other societies and the grounds of their society-based WSR? If they identify with the value of a given nationality or statehood (British, German, etc.), then they get to feel warranted shame and pride for what the nations/states do. If they identify with more specific values that these nations/states embody, they may get to escape the shame or pride for some of the things they do. For example, consider Cécile Fabre’s claim advanced in relation to post war justice: “Were I to encounter a German national who would express pride at the fact that Germany (or, rather, its predecessor state) gave J. S. Bach, Beethoven, and Schiller to the world … I would not assume that he might be sympathetic to Hitler.”28 We may be tempted to reject her point if we are imagining that every time we meet, the person keeps going on about how proud he is of being German (for the above reason) and never mentions any Nazis; just his pride for Germany giving the world these artistic achievements. We may think that the person is either willfully blind or morally incompetent. But he may be merely communicatively impaired: he may well really identify only with musical and literary excellence, which is fine, though he should also anticipate that this fact need not be obvious to his interlocutors and should be explained. Does this mean that one could also reasonably identify exclusively with (all) the achievements of one’s society and none of its failures? I think it’s not impossible, but difficult. It is difficult since there needs to be some coherence to the value one invests in. If I say that I identify with the achievements of Copernicus, Chopin, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Rosa Luxemburg, Alfred Tarski, and Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II) but not, say, those of Feliks Dzierżyński (the head of Cheka, the precursor to the NKVD), I need to explain why, on the one hand, I can pick all those Poles but not some others, and, on the other hand, I do not pick any outstanding non-Polish figures. Usually, people attempt to identify some national characteristic or a process that gives rise to musical, sporting, academic or political achievements. But once the focus is on the characteristic or the process, one needs to own up to some of the failures of this characteristic or the process, not just the achievements. VI. Implications All this throws up a difficulty for Kramer’s account that as far as I can tell has not been addressed by him in this first volume of his discussion of justice. Even if we grant Kramer all he wants about how the achievements of groups and outstanding individuals that belong to them can ground the WSR of others, I do not think that Kramer explains why it is the excellence of one’s society in particular that is necessary to group WSR for ordinary individuals, as opposed to the excellence of some other groups to which they belong. We can all identify and otherwise invest in values instantiated by our societies but also by larger groups—humanity—and by smaller groups, such as professional associations, political parties, college alumni, local associations, families. If we look at those whose WSR is the lowest, perhaps we should invest in their communities instead of investing in achievements of our society more generally? If Oxford political theorists were particularly lacking in WSR, perhaps Britain should invest in the excellence of Cambridge. Or perhaps it should invest in the excellence of Harvard—since Oxford political theorists could feel WSR on account of the achievements of Harvard scholars not just British scholars. Perhaps the state should try to shape people’s identities and investments of value to direct them towards the most effective ways of increasing their WSR. The New Yorker published a short piece once about a woman who did not find herself reflected in the names of streets, as these names referred to male surnames. But if she were to identify in a genderless way as a human she would see herself reflected there. If Aspirational Perfectionists are concerned to elevate WSR, they may have to consider policies that affect people’s identities as well as promote individual association with specific enactments of value, such as Shakespearean theatre. But this would make aspirational perfectionism start to resemble edificatory perfectionism. Ultimately, what shall we say about Matt Kramer’s book? Can it ground warranted self-respect in me? We do not share a national identity but I do have and have invested into an identity as an analytical political theorist. So when I saw the beautiful arguments and the helpfully numbered sections I did feel a well-warranted powerful surge of self-respect. I am grateful for comments to the participants of the conference on Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence held in June 2017 at Oxford. I thank Henrik Dahlquist for invaluable research assistance and Timothy Fowler, Ben Jackson and Jonathan Quong for comments or discussion. Footnotes 1 Matthew Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 3 John Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 342. 5 Ibid., 302-3; Stephen Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88 (1977): 36–49; J Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 440. 6 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 300. 7 For instance, Ibid., 366-7. 8 Ibid., 39. 9 Ibid., 352. 10 Ibid., 395. 11 Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 198. 12 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 357. 13 Ibid., 353, 363. 14 Ibid., 357. 15 Ibid., 358. 16 Ibid., 358. 17 Ibid., 358. 18 Ibid., 359. 19 Ibid., 370. 20 Ibid., 372. 21 Ibid., 372. 22 Ibid., 359. 23 Ibid., 364. 24 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 80. The name “Torturer’s Union” itself was coined by Elizabeth Ashford in her “The Inadequacy of our Traditional Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 19 (2006): 217-235. 25 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 370; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 528-9. 26 I do not mean by that that our identities or value endorsements are under our control. Nor only do we face internal constraints due to, among other things, socialization but also due to what Valentini, in a recent paper, has called “public-identity disempowerment.” See Laura Valentini, “On Public-Identity Disempowerment,” working paper. On a related issue see Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989); Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99; Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism, Expanded Edition, ed. Amy Gutmann, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994); Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18: 3–31. All cited by Valentini. 27 Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs, 208. 28 Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 288. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Jurisprudence Oxford University Press

Should I Be Proud of Liberalism with Excellence? On the Collective Grounds of Self-Respect

Stemplowska, Zofia
American Journal of Jurisprudence , Volume Advance Article (1) – Apr 10, 2018
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Abstract

Abstract In Liberalism with Excellence Kramer offers an account of liberalism that gets at something liberal philosophy often overlooks: the crucial importance for individuals of the success of their groups. According to Kramer, Rawlsian liberals acknowledge the importance to a just society of individuals enjoying warranted self-respect, but they overlook the fact that such warranted self-respect can be promoted by the state investing in the excellence of the society to which the individuals belong. In particular, warranted individual self-respect can be bolstered by one's society's achieving excellence, including through the exceptional artistic, sporting and other achievements of some of its individual members. Therefore, not only perfectionists who already think it is the state's role to promote valuable modes of living, but also Rawlsian liberals should expect the state to be in the business of investing in exceptional human achievements. In the article, I examine the core idea, on which the argument relies, that individual warranted self-respect can be promoted by the state through the promotion of the excellence of one’s society. I identify mechanisms through which individuals' warranted self-respect and society's excellence can stand in such a relationship. I argue that Kramer’s own account does not offer enough details for us to be able to judge whether it succeeds, and I suggest a possible direction in which the argument could be developed. I. Introduction In Liberalism with Excellence Matthew Kramer offers an account of liberalism that gets at something liberal philosophy often overlooks: the crucial importance for individuals of the success of their groups.1 He argues that the idea can be made coherent with two positions that have been developed in opposition to one another. The first position is that of Rawlsian liberalism.2 According to this view, where constitutional essentials are concerned, the state’s action cannot be justified with reference to the fact that it may promote values, projects, activities or modes of living aimed at the pursuit and achievement of the good life. In other words, justifications for state activity that concerns constitutional essentials should be confined to the advancement and honouring of justice. According to perfectionism, by contrast, the state can deliberately promote values, projects, activities and modes of living aimed at the good life; it can promote conceptions of the good. Kramer is a perfectionist. He argues that the state should invest in the success of the groups to which its citizens belong and that it can do so by promoting excellence in human achievements. This bolsters a variety of conceptions of the good, including those that value specific forms of such excellence. But Kramer argues that this is compatible with the Rawlsian liberal project. How? Because the excellence of one’s society or the achievements of outstanding individuals in one’s society bolsters the warranted self-respect of those who belong to the society. And, as Rawls sets it out, justice requires that individuals have a warranted sense of self-respect. In what follows, my focus is not on whether Kramer succeeds in co-opting Rawls to his project—and, by extension possibly also other political liberals such as Quong3—but on the idea, on which the argument relies, that individual warranted self-respect can be promoted by the state through the promotion of the excellence of the society to which the individuals whose self-respect is at stake belong. I will try to identify the mechanisms through which individuals’ self-respect and society can stand in such a relationship. I will suggest a possible direction in which the argument could be developed but will argue that currently Kramer’s account does not offer us enough detail to be able to judge if his argument can succeed. II. The Distinctiveness of Kramer’s Aspirational Perfectionism In Liberalism with Excellence Kramer’s account of the Rawlsian grounding of perfectionism is limited to the case of what he calls aspirational perfectionism. Aspirational perfectionism is distinguished by Kramer from edificatory perfectionism. What Kramer calls edificatory perfectionism focuses on “elevating” the “lifestyle or sensibilities” of each person. It aims for individuals to be able to live by better conceptions of the good. By contrast, aspirational perfectionism forgoes the former and instead “tries to endow a society with estimableness on which the warranted self-respect of every member of the society can be partly based.” How might aspirational perfectionism be grounded in Rawlsian ideas? Kramer offers the following strategy. First, he points out that Rawlsian justice requires, as one of its central demands, high warranted self-respect [WSR]. Second, except perhaps for a few towering geniuses (Kramer offers the example of Shakespeare), high WSR requires societal excellence, which can—and should—take various forms: social justice, outstanding achievements in arts, athletics, science, etc. Such societal excellence can be promoted by the state, for example through targeted subsidies. Since justice requires high WSR, justice requires the state to promote societal excellence including promoting outstanding achievements. As Kramer puts it, “[f]ostering of excellent achievements is properly one of the major roles of a system of governance.”4 In what follows I will most closely examine the claim that high WSR requires societal excellence. First, however, let me say a bit more about the idea that justice requires that WSR be high. III. Does Justice Require Warrantedness for High Self-Respect? What is self-respect? Kramer puts it in Darwallian as well as Rawlsian terms. Having self-respect involves (1) self-regarding appraisal respect (that is, acknowledgement of one’s character and achievements), and (2) recognition respect (acknowledgement of one’s moral standing).5 This means one needs to have confidence in one’s conception of the good, one’s chosen path in life, and confidence that one has the ability to pull it off, and also confidence that one has a moral standing to be treated by others as a bearer of conceptions of the good. Kramer refers in the discussion to self-respect as pride. I want to put aside the question of whether this is in line with Rawls’s views (it may be) or even whether we might use the idea of pride differently to that of self-respect more broadly. I will grant it that self-respect can be thought of as pride. Still, we face the question of whether justice really requires that the warranted self-respect be “ample” and at a “high level”?6 The claim that it needs to be “robust” or solid”—also made by Kramer7—seems more plausible. Why isn’t it enough that a person’s WSR is merely high enough to have a just life? Income and wealth, after all, need not be ample, for Rawls, they need merely suffice for justice. Why does it matter? Because if merely solid self-respect is sufficient, then perhaps the state need not promote that much outstanding individual achievements, if any, for the sake of individuals’ self-respect. That said, I accept that it is difficult to rule on just how high self-respect needs to be in order to serve justice, so in what follows I will grant for the sake of argument that it needs to be high. IV. The Collective Grounds for Warranted Self-Respect Let me focus, then, on the core idea that high WSR requires societal excellence. According to Kramer, people “are warranted … in feeling a heightened sense of self-esteem through the eminence of the community to which they belong.”8 In fact, for ordinary individuals who are not like Shakespeare, the excellence of “[one’s] … society” is a necessary condition (though not a sufficient one) “for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect.”9 We need to ask, then, through which mechanism social eminence can bear on one’s WSR. Here Kramer seems to identify two core possibilities: personal contribution and associating oneself with one’s society’s excellence. A. Personal Contribution One can personally contribute to society’s excellence—understood to include achievements such as justice but also outstanding achievements of its individual members—in a causal sense. One can contribute, for example, through one’s contribution to general taxation that is used to fund investment in outstanding individuals.10 If one personally contributes to the excellence of society, then the idea that society’s excellence bears on one’s WSR is not hard to grasp. Nonetheless, we can confront this thought with Dworkin’s skepticism about the potential of one’s personal contribution to bear on the value of one’s life. Focusing on the value of the impact of one’s life on the world, Dworkin writes, [I]f we measure a life’s value by its consequence, all but a few lives would have no value, and the great value of some other lives—a carpenter who pounded nails into a playhouse on the Thames—would be only accidental. On any plausible view of what is truly wonderful in almost any human life, impact hardly comes into the story at all.11 If we focus on what makes life “truly wonderful,” Dworkin has a point. If we focus on what can bestow warranted self-respect, we may be less sure: the nails need to be pounded into theatres and shops, the streets need to be cleaned, maybe even essays need to be examined. These contributions to society’s excellence may fall short of making one’s life “truly wonderful” but perhaps people can derive warranted self-respect from small contributions of this type. I will return to this problem—the problem of whether one’s typical personal contribution to societal excellence gives grounds for warranted self-respect—once have I outlined my proposal for the collective grounding of warranted self-respect below. B. One’s Association with the Excellence in One’s Society The second mechanism that Kramer’s writings can be interpreted as suggesting is one’s association with the excellence in one’s society. Kramer highlights the distinctiveness of this mechanism when he emphasizes that people are not thereby “personally responsible for the greatness with which they associate themselves.”12 The fact that no personal contribution is needed for this mechanism is also revealed when we are given an example of deriving self-respect from the fact that one’s region has an impressive mountain range. It is hard to imagine that most people personally contribute in any way to this fact. A more familiar example, also offered by Kramer, is that of a sports supporter who may feel warranted pride when her team wins, even if she makes no financial or other contribution to the effort. This type of warranted self-respect is vicarious (and there can also be vicarious shame).13 Anticipating worries about the moral permissibility of “vicarious pride,”14 Kramer argues for its possibility and moral permissibility by pointing out that appropriate vicarious pride is “separable … from any malign attitudes toward others,” need not involve taking credit for “the exploits of others,” need not amount to a display “of a person’s inadequacy” (whereby we feel vicarious pride to compensate for personal insufficiencies). Rather, “[someone] can simply be recognizing that the trajectory of his life comprises far more than solely his own doings. It also comprehends many of the doings of people who stand in sundry relationships to [him].” The success of others can “augment the luster of his life.”15 There are two key ideas here. First, postulating the mechanism involves the recognition that something beyond one’s “own doings” can “augment the luster” of one’s life. Second, Kramer makes a claim about “sundry relationships.” The first idea strikes me as undeniably correct—successes of others can augment the lustre of one’s life. However, this idea seems too broad to ground self-respect or vicarious pride. My life goes better when my partner does not cheat on me. Obama’s life goes better if the US health system is not destroyed and goes worse because Trump has been elected (showing that no virtues except unwavering insistence on one’s qualities, perhaps, are necessary to succeed at this). But while these things make one’s life go better or worse they need not necessarily bear on warranted self-respect (or shame). So the work needs to be done by the idea of the “sundry relationships” to link the individual whose self-respect is at stake to the excellence she did not personally produce. Which relationships qualify? At some point, in later passages, Kramer also talks of a significant association.16 What type would qualify as “significant”? One example offered by Kramer is that of “typical families.” The goodness of one’s life depends on how well the lives of other members of one’s family go. Another, of course, is that of one’s society. When it comes to the latter, “diverse activities cumulatively determine the character of their group to which they all are linked.”17 “Their conduct cumulatively shapes the ethical character of their society.”18 He adds, “[e]very generally law-abiding person who belongs to a society governed by a liberal-democratic regime can warrantedly take pride in those workings.”19 To add precision to the discussion, let me distinguish between various ways of association (in addition to that of personal responsibility, which falls under mechanism one postulated above and so is to be put aside): (a) collective responsibility, (b) membership, (c), endorsing the values represented by the case in question. C. Collective Responsibility Kramer is explicit in the text that he is interested in collective responsibility.20 The difficulty for assessing whether it can play the role it needs is that he does not give us an account of how he understands it. The reference to the law-abiding person in the quotation reported above (the “law-abiding person” who “warrantedly” takes pride in the ethical character of society) may perhaps be read as suggesting that self-respect on the basis of the achievement of one’s society should track one’s support for the achievements of the outstanding individuals who belong there, or at least for the society. What would count as “support”? Elsewhere Kramer emphasizes that even someone who is fighting the injustice of one’s society is to be associated with the injustice. He suggests that the impact on one’s WSR of living in an unjust regime is “independent of her supportiveness or unsupportiveness of the tyrannical regime.”21 He argues that: “Even when somebody fiercely dissociates himself from the society to which he belongs, the trajectory of his life … will have been inflected” by what the society does.22 In other words, but with the help of Kramer’s own example, shame for the injustice of one’s society is warranted even if you are Havel in Czechoslovakia: “the conditions for the full warrantedness of a robust sense of self-respect on his part … were not in place.”23 All this suggests that the idea of supporting the achievements of the society should perhaps be understood in terms of a purely causal involvement, irrespective of one’s attitudes or intentions. Perhaps even the most vocal dissenter is still causally involved when, for example, he buys food and participates in the market. But imagine someone who is like Ghandi or Mandela or Vaclav Havel or Lech Wałęsa and suppose that despite their best efforts they were unsuccessful (so, maybe, a better image is that of dissenters in North Korea). Are they really to be seen as associated with the injustice? They did buy food and their actions created employment opportunities for prison guards. But, to me, their association with the injustice, if any, seems insufficient to count them as part of the relevant collective achievement of injustice in a way that should generate self-shame. Let me be more precise. I do not want to dispute that they may feel less self-respect if they failed than they are warranted in feeling when they succeeded. But I am disputing that they should feel shame. My broader point here is that it is even unclear what one should be seen as being causally involved in. This difficulty is obscured by the fact that in typical philosophical examples illustrating the need for the concept of collective responsibility, the problem of whether someone should be associated with one end or another does not arise since there is just one end to consider. Think for example of Parfit’s torturer’s union—the hypothetical scenario in which 1000 separate and separated individuals independently press 1000 buttons that, each, carry imperceptible electric charges dispersed among 1000 victims who feel enormous pain as 1000 imperceptible charges join together.24 Here there is just one activity and one possible result of participation there. Similarly, when Rawls—whom Kramer quotes—talks about collective responsibility, it is responsibility for the good of a just society under conditions of full compliance. We are all working in such a society towards justice.25 But of course societies achieve a variety of things, many of which cancel each other out and where each person’s alignment with a given end may be complicated. For a concrete example, consider this case. There was some limited active resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1940s (think, for example, of Sophie Scholl) but the problem is that this was done against the society rather than because of it. I do not mean that the majority was actively supporting the Nazis but that they were, at most, passively resisting and many did not do even that. Given this, it is not clear that those who did not actively resist could claim warranted self-respect on the grounds of any sufficient association with those who did. And similarly, it is not clear that those who did actively resist throughout are sufficiently associated with the Nazi regime to feel warranted shame at what it did. The difficulty for any account of collective responsibility is that it (1) cannot demand that each individual involvement in the collective outcome be a net contribution to that outcome—this would miss out on too many forms in which individuals are involved. But, at the same time, it also (2) cannot assume that any involvement in the group makes one collectively responsible with others for everything the group does. There may well be a successful way of navigating this terrain (many have tried) but even if Kramer were to adopt one of those, it is, in fact, unlikely to establish the grounds for a purely vicarious pride and one that grounds pride of all members of society. I suspect that any successful account of collective responsibility will have to rely on some reasonably foreseeable net contribution to the outcome or acting the same way as those who did offer such a net contribution. And this means that societal excellence—and in particular excellence achieved through the successes of outstanding individuals—would offer warranted self-respect to many fewer people than I take Kramer to suggest. D. Membership To remedy the problem of the narrow scope of the reach of the idea of collective responsibility for the achievements of outstanding individuals, we could adopt instead a principle that sees mere membership of the group, for example, citizenship, as sufficient for a significant association. But obviously this would re-introduce some of the other problems mentioned above. Let me, therefore, explore a further possibility instead. E. Endorsing the Values Represented by the Achievement We could try to avoid the above mentioned difficulties by cashing out “significant association” as “endorsement” of the association or in particular of the excellence in question. On this view, one associates oneself by endorsing the things one values (which in most cases means simply that one associates oneself by valuing). That is, it is not clear that we can take warranted vicarious pride in all the achievements we value. We can take pride in valuing them if they are valuable but not in them per se. Drawing warranted self-respect out of such an association would mean gaining warranted self-respect too easily. Suppose my sister (who is not a political theorist and lives in Warsaw and so does not belong to any of Kramer’s associations) has read and values Kramer’s book. Unless she claimed increased self-respect on account of her and his common humanity, I do not think that mere valuing of Kramer’s book would warrant increased self-respect for her here. V. Significant Association We are now in a position to ask and answer the question of what do we want from our account of a significant association. Such an account needs to meet: The particularity criterion. Needs to tie individuals to particular achievements, not just to a group, thereby making it possible that warranted self-respect of someone who is a member of a group is not affected by everything the group does. (cf. Sophie Scholl) The wide reach criterion. Needs to tie individuals to particular achievements in a way that does not presuppose personal responsibility for the achievement. (cf. Football fan) The anti-narcissism (and anti-self-flagellation) criterion. Needs to tie individuals to particular achievements in a way that does not allow them to over-claim (cf. My sister and Kramer’s book) Let me briefly sketch out possible ways out of the difficulty. One tempting (but ultimately misguided) proposal might be Proposal 1: WSR can be grounded in a project/achievement you value provided you are causally involved in the society that helped the achievement/project. The proposal meets the wide reach criterion. It meets the particular achievement criterion. If Sophie Scholl said she did not value Germany’s actions during the war, but did value active resistance she would be appropriately tied only to the achievements of the active resistance. But the proposal fails to meet the anti-narcissism criterion. The fact that the person needs to be causally involved in a given society takes care of some instances of narcissism (such as my sister’s) but does not take care of others. If a British friend of mine who campaigned against public funding for Universities claimed she feels her warranted self-respect can increase because of Kramer’s book, she would be over-claiming. She values the book, but she is over-claiming, nonetheless, because her actions were aimed at making it harder for Kramer to be productive. This only reveals the strangeness of the idea that one can gain warranted self-respect on the basis of a project to which one is causally tied merely through one’s society. But we can satisfy the anti-narcissism criterion differently (without falling foul of the wide range criterion). It is not enough that you value something and not necessary that you are causally involved in the particular achievement. The typical football fan is of course causally involved but even if she never paid for any tickets or otherwise tangibly contributed to the team’s success she would be warranted to feel pride when they did well if she religiously followed the team’s results, told everyone she supports Oxford United, and decorated her house in blue and yellow. One needs to not merely value something but invest oneself into the value or the enactment of the value. Most often this takes the form of personal net contribution to the value. But sometimes it takes the form of expressing the values through one’s identity or through otherwise respecting the value.26 This idea of investing into value via one’s identity is Dworkinian, and may well be Kramerian too. Dworkin even, helpfully, can be thought to link it to self-respect: one of the responsibilities involved in discharging one’s ethical obligation to live well, which we need for self-respect, is to affirm oneself as an expression of what is of value.27 There are limits on what I can make myself an expression of that I will leave unexplored except to say that my capacities may constrain me: if I cannot learn Chinese, I cannot build an identity around the Chinese language. So this is not to deny that it may be hard, and sometimes impossible, to identify with some achievements of cultures one was not born into. Though even then it is usually possible to invest in some other way in the enactment of the value. Proposal 2: WSR can be grounded in how the enactments of the value I invested in (including through my identity) fare in a reasonably foreseeable way. For illustration, let me return to the carpenter sticking a nail into The Globe. Someone who stuck a nail in but did not value theatre, could not claim warranted self-respect for Shakespeare’s successes there: a nail is not enough. The intuitiveness of the thought that even a mere nail or small tax contribution ground WSR in my view resides in this route, not in the personal responsibility one. What does the pride attach to here? There is clearly warranted pride in having located your investment well, in the right values. So we can easily say that you can be proud of that. But, in addition, I think that we can also say that I am proud of the achievement itself if the achievement was a reasonably foreseeable outcome of the instantiation of value I invested in. To make it more concrete, suppose someone does support Oxford United—because they enact the special value of camaraderie, sport, competitiveness and Oxford. If the team smashes up a hotel, they should feel warranted shame for this is a reasonably foreseeable outcome of being an English football team that, by assumption, is being invested in here. If the team throws racist abuse at passers by in town, they need not feel it since overt displays or violently racist conduct has been largely stamped out of English football. It is also possible to invest oneself in the value of a magnificent mountain range by learning about it, organizing exhibitions about it, photographing it, etc. and feel pride on account of the mountain range winning the best mountain range competition. On my account, should the range be destroyed by entities you do not identify or invest yourself into, shame would not be warranted. What would this proposal allow us to say about Sophie Scholl and other dissenters in other societies and the grounds of their society-based WSR? If they identify with the value of a given nationality or statehood (British, German, etc.), then they get to feel warranted shame and pride for what the nations/states do. If they identify with more specific values that these nations/states embody, they may get to escape the shame or pride for some of the things they do. For example, consider Cécile Fabre’s claim advanced in relation to post war justice: “Were I to encounter a German national who would express pride at the fact that Germany (or, rather, its predecessor state) gave J. S. Bach, Beethoven, and Schiller to the world … I would not assume that he might be sympathetic to Hitler.”28 We may be tempted to reject her point if we are imagining that every time we meet, the person keeps going on about how proud he is of being German (for the above reason) and never mentions any Nazis; just his pride for Germany giving the world these artistic achievements. We may think that the person is either willfully blind or morally incompetent. But he may be merely communicatively impaired: he may well really identify only with musical and literary excellence, which is fine, though he should also anticipate that this fact need not be obvious to his interlocutors and should be explained. Does this mean that one could also reasonably identify exclusively with (all) the achievements of one’s society and none of its failures? I think it’s not impossible, but difficult. It is difficult since there needs to be some coherence to the value one invests in. If I say that I identify with the achievements of Copernicus, Chopin, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Rosa Luxemburg, Alfred Tarski, and Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II) but not, say, those of Feliks Dzierżyński (the head of Cheka, the precursor to the NKVD), I need to explain why, on the one hand, I can pick all those Poles but not some others, and, on the other hand, I do not pick any outstanding non-Polish figures. Usually, people attempt to identify some national characteristic or a process that gives rise to musical, sporting, academic or political achievements. But once the focus is on the characteristic or the process, one needs to own up to some of the failures of this characteristic or the process, not just the achievements. VI. Implications All this throws up a difficulty for Kramer’s account that as far as I can tell has not been addressed by him in this first volume of his discussion of justice. Even if we grant Kramer all he wants about how the achievements of groups and outstanding individuals that belong to them can ground the WSR of others, I do not think that Kramer explains why it is the excellence of one’s society in particular that is necessary to group WSR for ordinary individuals, as opposed to the excellence of some other groups to which they belong. We can all identify and otherwise invest in values instantiated by our societies but also by larger groups—humanity—and by smaller groups, such as professional associations, political parties, college alumni, local associations, families. If we look at those whose WSR is the lowest, perhaps we should invest in their communities instead of investing in achievements of our society more generally? If Oxford political theorists were particularly lacking in WSR, perhaps Britain should invest in the excellence of Cambridge. Or perhaps it should invest in the excellence of Harvard—since Oxford political theorists could feel WSR on account of the achievements of Harvard scholars not just British scholars. Perhaps the state should try to shape people’s identities and investments of value to direct them towards the most effective ways of increasing their WSR. The New Yorker published a short piece once about a woman who did not find herself reflected in the names of streets, as these names referred to male surnames. But if she were to identify in a genderless way as a human she would see herself reflected there. If Aspirational Perfectionists are concerned to elevate WSR, they may have to consider policies that affect people’s identities as well as promote individual association with specific enactments of value, such as Shakespearean theatre. But this would make aspirational perfectionism start to resemble edificatory perfectionism. Ultimately, what shall we say about Matt Kramer’s book? Can it ground warranted self-respect in me? We do not share a national identity but I do have and have invested into an identity as an analytical political theorist. So when I saw the beautiful arguments and the helpfully numbered sections I did feel a well-warranted powerful surge of self-respect. I am grateful for comments to the participants of the conference on Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence held in June 2017 at Oxford. I thank Henrik Dahlquist for invaluable research assistance and Timothy Fowler, Ben Jackson and Jonathan Quong for comments or discussion. Footnotes 1 Matthew Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 3 John Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 342. 5 Ibid., 302-3; Stephen Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88 (1977): 36–49; J Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 440. 6 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 300. 7 For instance, Ibid., 366-7. 8 Ibid., 39. 9 Ibid., 352. 10 Ibid., 395. 11 Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 198. 12 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 357. 13 Ibid., 353, 363. 14 Ibid., 357. 15 Ibid., 358. 16 Ibid., 358. 17 Ibid., 358. 18 Ibid., 359. 19 Ibid., 370. 20 Ibid., 372. 21 Ibid., 372. 22 Ibid., 359. 23 Ibid., 364. 24 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 80. The name “Torturer’s Union” itself was coined by Elizabeth Ashford in her “The Inadequacy of our Traditional Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 19 (2006): 217-235. 25 Kramer, Liberalism with Excellence, 370; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 528-9. 26 I do not mean by that that our identities or value endorsements are under our control. Nor only do we face internal constraints due to, among other things, socialization but also due to what Valentini, in a recent paper, has called “public-identity disempowerment.” See Laura Valentini, “On Public-Identity Disempowerment,” working paper. On a related issue see Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989); Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99; Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism, Expanded Edition, ed. Amy Gutmann, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994); Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18: 3–31. All cited by Valentini. 27 Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs, 208. 28 Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 288. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com. 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Journal

American Journal of Jurisprudence – Oxford University Press

Published: Apr 10, 2018

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