Book review of Alison Stone's Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, published by Cambridge UP, 2006. ISBN 978-0-521-86270-7

A structural affinity between republican freedom as non-domination and human rights claims accounts for the relevance of republicanism for cosmopolitan concerns. Central features of republican freedom is its institution dependence and the modal aspect it adds to being free. Its chief concern is not constraint, but the way in which an agent is constrained or not. To the extent I am vulnerable to someone’s dispositional power over me I am not free, even if I am not in fact constrained. Republican freedom adds a substantial element to a justification of human rights in terms of entitlement, rather than mere satisfaction of interests. A satisfied interest is not a satisfied right if the satisfaction is dependent on personal good-will and can be withdrawn at any time. Like republican freedom, human rights claims add a modal aspect to enjoyment. Both can be violated by institutional arrangement alone and can be secured only within accountable institutions. National borders may well be irrelevant to the dispositional powers to which people are vulnerable. An international set of institutions globalizes those circumstances in which republican liberty arises as a concern.

In this essay I seek to find a balance between a respect for the enduring force of a philosophical idea and for the sensitivity to contextual understanding of what philosophical ideas are.

The argument in this chapter proceeds from an empirical fact and a conceptual dissatisfaction. ‘Genetic discrimination’ is now an ethical and legal issue. In countries like France, Denmark and Norway insurance companies and employers are banned from asking individuals to undergo or disclose results from genetic tests. There is backing in the Council of Europe's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine and the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. The term ‘discrimination’ is explicitly used in these documents. In Sweden, legislation was recently proposed by a parliamentary committee. The proposals affect both the insurance sector (previously regulated in a trade agreement) and the employment sector (previously unregulated).

David Hume regarded the investigation of politics as integrated part of his philosophical enterprise: tha analysis of human nature, thinking, and agency on the basis of observation and experience. He saw the two dominant philosophical views on politics in his contemporary world as proceeding from fictions without foundation: the fiction of the social contract on the one hand and the fiction of divine authorization on the other. Hume strived to see through these fictions, in an investigation of how societies really function and how people behave within them. HIs political thought is treated here as a radical contribution to political philosophy, but the radical nature of his thought can be appreciated only by placing it in the context of Humes philosophical project as a whole and the contemporary political debate he wished to shape.

One of the more puzzling aspects of Kant’s political thought is his insistence on the duty to obey even oppressive rulers combined with his belief in the republic as the only rightful constitutional form. In arguing that resisting oppressive power is as wrong as seizing it, Kant seems committed to the awkward position of denouncing as unrightful any attempts made by the people to establish the only rightful form of constitution. Several roads are available for anyone who might be inclined to attempt to dissolve this tension on Kant’s behalf. I will discuss the purpose of the civil condition and the obligation to move to it from the state of nature, arguing that the purpose of the state for Kant is to secure peace. I also contend that the social contract neither causes the state to exist nor justifies obedience to it. I will proceed to contemplate the civil condition as a state of freedom and, with that in mind, ask two questions about obligation, one relating to the republican form of the state and one to non-republican despotic forms. How can it be that all members of the republic are said to remain free while obligated to law when only a few are granted the law-making citizenship status which is supposed to dissolve the tension between freedom and obligation? How can it be that subjects are obligated to obey an oppressive regime that abuses its authority? These discussions will take us through the role of representation, the people as cause and the status of law, to the state as progressive.

We are all good liberals now and believe in civil rights and individual freedoms. Given that, what does liberalism as a distinct political alternative look like? Being a liberal must mean something more specific than a vague preferences for toleration and freedom of speech. In this book liberalism is analysed a theory of justice – a political philosophy of fair institutions. Different liberalisms are discussed against the background of what units them, which the author claims to be: a particular view of the human person, a focus on individual rights and a specific answer to the question of what individual freedom consists.

On a functional approach to a concept one aims to address the question of why we use it at all. What is the work we want the concept to do? There can be nothing neutral about the answer to that question and the answer will not be found by merely looking at the world. The answer will be part of an elaboration of our moral and political commitments. It will be functional to the overall theory within which we use it. My aim in this article is to explore the multifaceted character of freedom, encouraged by a functional approach. Mainly, I wish to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between two questions, one concerning the meaning of liberty—What is liberty understood to be? What does it mean?—and another concerning the circumstances under which issues of liberty arise—What has to be the case for a state of affairs to be appropriately described as one of freedom or unfreedom? A number of mistakes and confusions can be cleared up if we appreciate that a factor can be an element of liberty without being included in the meaning of it, but instead in the circumstances that have to obtain for liberty to be a concern. This requires that the two questions, although related, are kept analytically distinct.

In this article I discuss different ways of conceptualising the relation between liberty and law. By ‘law’ I refer throughout to law in the sense of civil law: rules with accompanying sanctions, promulgated by a legislator for the regulation of action in political society. I do not intend to say anything about ‘natural law’, unless I explicitly state otherwise. For the purposes of my argument I will loosely group the positions I discuss under different labels: ‘liberty from the law’, ‘liberty by the law’, and ‘liberty under law’. There is nothing self-serving about these labels; indeed, they may appear simplistic and historically inept. I use them to direct our attention and in order to illustrate a general point that I wish to make, a point that seems to me to fall out of the preceeding discussion. That point is that concepts like liberty are institution dependent and that we cannot hope to understand or even talk about what they mean without adhering to that fact. To anticipate, I will argue that even when liberty is understood in terms of the absence of law, the presence of law or the possibility of its presence will have to be assumed in principle in order for its absence to make sense.

In this article Hobbes’s view of the commonwealth, and of law and liberty within it, is discussed from the point of view of social ontology. The artificial character of the commonwealth and the constitutive function of the covenant is put in terms of the institutional world being constructed through collective intentionality, which is performative, self-referential, and collective, and which serves as truth-maker. Hobbes is used here to make the point that it is a mistake to argue, as for example Tuomela has done, that the construction of institutions require a joint commitment: we-attitudes held in the we-mode. Instead, institutions on a ‘Hobbesian’ model are constructed by we-attitudes held in the I-mode. This analysis is used in a discussion of law as an institution and law serving as a constraint on freedom. The constructive character of law means that the idea of law can serve as a constraint even in an area of life where in actual fact is unregulated. In order to assess whether liberty can be said to be infringed when that happens we need to go back to the notion of an external constraint, appreciating that what agents there are, what they can do and the powers they possess are functions of collective attitudes conveying meaning and status.

Multiculturalism is an elusive term that serves as a label for a very diverse set of views. This chapter tries to bring the discussion of multiculturalism into some order through a critical inventory of the uses to which it is put, particularly in relation to human rights. Most advocates agree that basic democratic rights and freedoms may not be sacrificed for the sake of religious and cultural traditions, but what does that mean and where to draw the line?

Ordet populism förekommer flitigt i den nordiska politiska retoriken just nu, inte minst i kölvattnet av Sverigedemokraternas och Sannfinländarnas valframgångar. I Norden har populism kommit att bli liktydigt med främlingsfientlighet i kombination med nationalism och konservativ värdepolitik; det har kommit att fungera som etikett på en grupp misshagliga partier som man helst vill slippa befatta sig med. Populism har kommit att bli en retorisk markör för det som bör avfärdas. Att benämna ett politiskt utspel populistiskt är detsamma som att säga att det inte förtjänar att bemötas i sak. Denna retoriska funktion gör i sin tur att de som benämns som populister slipper argumentera i sak och istället kan samla enkla sympatier på att de blir avfärdade och inte riktigt får vara med i finrummen. De kan fortsätta att legitimera sig genom sitt anspråk på att representera den vanliga människans enkla smak, utan att närmare behöva konfronteras med vad den vanliga människan egentligen tycker eller ens vem hon är. Finns det då någonting som vi med säkerhet kan säga om vad populism är, annat än att det är något som mest andra ägnar sig åt? Att med stolthet referera till sig själv som populist är inte vanligt. Att referera till sig själv som en som har den lilla människans intresse varmt om hjärtat, som står upp för folk i gemen, är däremot politiskt allmängods, så vad är skillnaden?

Review of Catherine Villanueva Gardner Historical Dictionary of Feminist Philosophy. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2006.

Review of Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

I denna artikel diskuteras lagstiftning som metod för att motverka diskriminering och den form som svensk diskrimineringslag har med avsikt att utvärdera diskrimineringslagens potential att fungera som det instrument för rättvisa det avses vara. Som illustration tjänar ett rättfall från Arbetsdomstolen, det så kallade Barnmorskemålet.

I argue along the following lines: For Wollstonecraft, liberty is independence in two different spheres, one presupposing the other. On the one hand, liberty is independence in relation to others, in the sense of not being vulnerable to their whim or arbitrary will. Call this social, or political, liberty. For liberty understood in this way, infringements do not require individual instances of interfering. Liberty is lost in unequal relationships, through dependence on the goodwill of a master. In addition, liberty is independence of mind, a state I am in when I trust my own reasoned judgement above any other authority. Call this moral liberty. Moral liberty needs social liberty. In other words, to the extent I am subject to the whim of others, I am not in a position to be guided by my own judgement. Moral liberty is one of two aspects of virtue: a disposition to independent deliberation according to reason. As such, virtue is a habit of mind. The second aspect of virtue is universal benevolence as its action guiding principle. This is how liberty, equality, and virtue fit together. Social liberty, understood as independence in relation to others, necessarily coexist with equality, and is necessary for moral liberty, the habit of mind that makes up one aspect of virtue, as well as for universal benevolence as virtue’s action guiding principle. This triad explains her views on property, on sex equality, and also on legitimate government. My second line of argument is that according to Wollstonecraft, we have a duty to be virtuous. Virtue is the main object of human life. But since virtue, in both its aspects, needs social liberty and since liberty is the birthright of man, the duty is conditioned on the right. The foundation for the triad of liberty, equality, and virtue is a theory of rights. The basis for the discussion of virtue is the right to the conditions necessary for its realization. The duty is conditioned on the right to liberty.

I identify what I see as three aspects of contemorary cosmopolitan philosophy: A certain moral consciousness, a commitment to moral universalism, and an institutional implication of the first two. The third of these is often regarded as a fall-out or consequence of the other two. I argue instead that the institutional aspect should be regarded as primary and that a distinctive feature of cosmopolitan theory is the view that justice is institution-dependent.