Browsing by Author "Knight, Jack"

In this paper I revisit a perplexing question about Arendt’s theory of judgment: what is the relationship between the normative function of judgment and the perspective of the vita contemplativa in her Kant Lectures. Pace the scholars who conceive the perspective of the vita contemplativa as a perspective irrelevant to guiding our activities and appraisal, I suppose that the perspective of the vita contemplativa is intrinsic to Arendt’s project to study the normative function of judgment. I will argue that Arendt’s quest for intersubjectivity is not adequate if it is not completed by a robust criterion to tell the justified right to demand universal assent from the spurious ones. Therefore, she has to find a perspective with reference to which this condition could be specified. Now the perspective of the vita contemplativa plays this role.

This dissertation challenges the long-standing albeit usually implicit association between political moderation and nonviolent political action. For the three figures I examine here—Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Václav Havel—nonviolence is not a middle way between resignation and the kind of violent resistance many democratic theorists now endorse. Gandhi, King, and Havel each reject violent forms of resistance on the grounds that it marks a continuation instead of a break from a world built on and sustained by state or state-sanctioned violence. Put bluntly, violent forms of resistance are not too radical for Gandhi, King, and Havel; they are not radical enough. I ultimately argue that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s uncompromising commitment to nonviolent political action means that they are better described as zealots than political moderates. They exceed the bounds of normal politics as they ardently pursue their cause.

What motivates and sustains their zealous politics? I contend that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s zealotry is underpinned by what feminist and womanist theorists have called relationality—to be human, Gandhi, King, and Havel, believe, is to be constituted by the needs of the concrete and particular other. As a result, Gandhi, King, and Havel are compelled to respond when they witness someone harmed by state or state-sanctioned violence, even when doing so carried enormous costs and even if the likelihood of mitigating the harm is minimal, at best. Crucially, Gandhi, King, and Havel not only understand themselves as inextricably related to those who are harmed, but to the perpetrators of harm as well. Hence their embrace of nonviolent political action; they are unwilling to harm those who harm others.

I do not think democratic theorists should be in the business of arguing that those subject to state or state-sponsored violence should refuse to respond in kind. As such, I am not proposing that Gandhi, King, and Havel offer a new normative model of resistance. That said, I contend that Gandhi, King, and Havel give democratic theorists reason to re-examine the role of zealotry in pluralistic political communities. In brief, Gandhi, King, and Havel show that not all zealots introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice. Pluralistic political communities, then, should make room for zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel. And doing so requires considering the ontology—I am principally concerned with conceptions of human being or social ontology, here—of the various zealots who exceed the bounds of normal politics when ardently pursuing their cause. I introduce a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism to help democratic theorists distinguish between zealots that introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustices and those who, like Gandhi, King, and Havel, seem to have the opposite effect.

In this project, I examine why the judicial authority of the United States Supreme Court has increased. I propose a theoretical explanation of endogenous institutional change at the Court whereby the actions of the Court---specifically its decisions and the opinions in which it announces those decisions---have, over the long-run, altered the structures of the American separation-of-powers system. The Court has built up public support for the institution of judicial review to such a degree that its rulings are respected even when opposed by strong political actors---including the public. I evaluate this theory by analyzing three important transitional periods of Supreme Court history. The first case study explores the Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, and examines how the Court established judicial review as the most important means of constitutional interpretation. The second case study explores the Court's first cases interpreting the three Reconstruction Amendments, and shows that through these decisions the Court established itself as the arbiter of the meaning of these new amendments. The third case study looks at the Court's decision to hear reapportionment cases and its articulation of the political question doctrine that provided a legalistic method of expanding the political power of the Court. I conclude from these case studies that my theory provides a useful explanation for the expansion of judicial authority.

Well-known deliberative institutions are subject to critique because they involve a limited number of citizens in the decision-making process, excluding the general public. This paper identifies this critique as a concern regarding political equality. Based on a relational egalitarian interpretation of political equality, this paper argues that addressing political inequality requires not only discussing potential mechanisms for the general public's inclusion in the deliberative process but also articulating the value of their participation to ensure that their discourses are treated with the same weight as those of citizens inside deliberative institutions. Drawing on insights from linguistics and the philosophy of language, this paper proposes that individuals with less background knowledge can positively contribute to deliberation by asking questions that unveil the implicit presuppositions in deliberative discourses. Analyzing discourse samples from the 2015 Taiwanese public consultation, this paper further demonstrates how individuals can effectively employ this approach in real-life deliberative settings.

This thesis seeks to determine whether the federal criminal law has been used increasingly in the past several decades to punish conduct that poses a general threat to society, rather than conduct that causes a concrete harm to a particular victim. It situates this question within a broader discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, including rising incarceration rates, the theoretical justifications for punishment, and important legal limitations on its exercise.

To determine whether the federal criminal law has been used increasingly to punish threats, this thesis charts the enforcement of twenty main categories of federal crimes over the past forty years. It gathers and organizes data on criminal case filings published yearly by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. After calculating the trend of enforcement for each crime, it groups the twenty crimes into three categories based on whether the prohibited conduct constitutes a concrete harm versus a general threat of harm.

Analyzing the results, the thesis concludes that there has been a strong trend over the past two decades to use the federal criminal law to target conduct which threatens to harm society, rather than conduct that does concrete harm to an identifiable victim. It argues that this trend is problematic for several reasons: it signifies that federal criminal law will be used to further exacerbate already escalated levels of criminal punishment in the nation; the use of criminal law to target conduct which threatens society is weakly justified theoretically; and using the criminal law to target conduct which threatens society weakens important safeguards in the law designed to constrain the use of criminal punishment.

This dissertation identifies a logic of “equal agency” at the heart of a great deal of contemporary thinking about politics. Scholars and citizens alike, I claim, often use some version of this logic in trying to understand what is valuable about liberal and democratic institutions. As a way of thinking democratically at the highest level, however—as a comprehensive principle for organizing our various practical and theoretical commitments, understanding the nature and value of democracy, and orienting ourselves towards a democratic future—I believe that it is deeply flawed. This dissertation demonstrates why such an alternative is needed, and proceeds to articulate one: the dispersion of power.

The introduction lays out the scope and methods before giving a chapter outline and a summary of the dissertation’s contributions. Chapter one gives an account of the logic of equal agency, demonstrating its pervasiveness in political theory and its reliance on an ideal of individual subjectivity. Chapter two employs contemporary biology and cognitive science to support Foucault’s critique of subjectivity, and chapter three demonstrates that this should lead us to abandon the logic of equal agency more generally. Chapter four articulates conceptions of agency and power that are compatible with Foucault’s critique, and chapter five demonstrates how we might “think democratically” using these concepts within a logic of dispersing power. Chapter six links a crisis in contemporary democratic theory to the logic of equal agency and suggests that the dispersion of power can help to resolve it; a promise that is followed up in chapter seven. Chapter eight concludes by employing the logic of dispersing power to advocate for a universal basic income.

This essay explores majority decisions to give up majority power. In particular, it analyzes a majority's decision to institute judicial review as a method of final decision-making on questions of constitutional rights and contrasts that decision with the majority's election of a dictator. Both decisions involve a majority's voluntary transfer of power for certain matters in irreversible ways. Adopting the proceduralist viewpoint, the essay argues that these types of decisions--involving majoritarian renunciation of power--require a greater justification than decisions that do not alter future decision-procedures. That greater justification requires these types of decisions, decisions this essay terms "delegation decisions," to satisfy three legitimacy conditions. First, the majority can only legitimately give up power over issues that can be decided by procedures other than majority vote. Second, the procedural mechanism the majority gives power to must be a fair procedure. Finally, the procedural mechanism must also be appropriate for the decisions it is supposed to make.

The essay argues that majoritarian imposition of judicial review satisfies these three conditions. Majoritarian election of a dictator does not. First, the imposition of judicial review hands over only one set of issues to the constitutional court--bill of rights questions--that is capable of resolution by a nonmajoritarian procedure. Second, judicial review as practiced by an ideal constitutional court is a fair procedure for rights questions because it exemplifies qualities such as anonymity and neutrality that are central to procedural fairness. Finally, a constitutional court is appropriate for deciding constitutional rights questions because its virtues--particularly its transparency, deliberative capacity, principled reasoning, and impartiality--are relevant for these questions and mitigate distortions in the decision-making process concerning rights. On the other hand, an elected despot makes decisions on questions that the majority cannot legitimately relinquish power over, fails to instantiate values of procedural fairness, and is inappropriate for any number of the infinite questions that it has authority to decide. Proceduralists can thus resist the majority's election of a dictator without also having to resist its imposition of judicial review. And they need not abandon proceduralism in order to do so.

The suspicion that the advent of the internet marks some sort of qualitative change in the development of the human affairs motivates much diagnosis but less instruction about the contemporary political moment. Are there normative implications to recent advances in information technology? This dissertation examines three political conflicts over the use of the internet in a liberal democratic society. Each controversy reflects a basic disagreement about the appropriate domain of the public sphere: whether to accommodate electronic forms of civil disobedience, to treat digital information as intellectual property, or to sanction the act of leaking. Each chapter of the dissertation uses the work and writings of a political activist for insight into competing claims over what should count as a use or abuse or new technology. Electronic methods of political protest clarify an important feature of the justification of civil disobedience that scholars should take into consideration even in the more traditional circumstances in which it is practiced. Current and historical controversies surrounding the ethics of leaking call into question who should have the authority to decide what the public has the right to know. And the free software movement challenges long-standing assumptions about the justification of intellectual property and the public interest bargain at the heart of it. Together, these cases illustrates the normative implications to recent advances in information technology.