Datum: 23 april 2025
Tid: 10:00-11:45
Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13 in Stockholm, or online.
Research seminar with Eva Erman, Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on democratic theory, specifically on questions of democracy beyond the state, in a global context, as well as methodological and metatheoretical questions in political theory, such as questions about ideal and non-ideal theory and feasibility.
Abstract
It is often assumed that feasibility is highly significant for normative thought, perhaps particularly in our normative thinking about politics. In the last years, the question about feasibility has been intensively discussed in political philosophy. It is argued that the ‘ought implies can’ principle needs to be specified for practical purposes, so that our normative thinking about politics does not become naïve and ineffective. One of the core issues in this debate is whether feasibility is a constraint on the validity of a certain class of normative claims. Defenders of this view argue that claims such as ‘we ought to eliminate poverty’ or we ought to create a world state’ are false because they make infeasible demands. But sceptical voices are also raised, insisting that treating infeasibility as a value-neutral ‘normative argument-stopper’ runs the risk of reproducing background conditions that makes certain states of affairs appear unattainable when they actually are not. In fact, recent attempts have been made to show that feasibility is in fact not useful at all for normative theorizing about politics. The argument is that any modal account of feasibility is necessarily moralized since it must make use of value-laden premises. Feasibility therefore loses its intended role as a neutral arbiter when considering which options are appropriate for consideration in practical deliberation about what we ought to do. Either feasibility is moralized, or it is indistinguishable from possibility, which leads us back to square one relying on ‘ought implies can’. In the paper I will present, we refute this conclusion. We make two claims: first, feasibility need not be a moralized notion, and second, feasibility should not be used as a moralized notion, since then it loses is important practical function of being a precondition for appropriate consideration in practical deliberation about what we ought to do in the political domain.
If you wish to receive our newsletters, and invitations to our seminars, subscribe here.
