RESEARCH
The matter of justice at the heart of my dissertation work has been participation parity. In particular, I am interested in studying how culture and individual actions taken within it can limit or enhance an individual’s ability to participate in public, political deliberation as full and equal members of the political community. Given the general liberal commitment to popular sovereignty, the issue of participation parity should be considered to be a matter of justice across a wide range of liberal projects. This is because, I argue, participation within the state and authorship over the laws and structures that ultimately influence our lives is essential to ensuring that state interference in our lives does not ultimately constitute an unjust limitation of our freedom.
A state is just iff it recognizes its citizens as both subjects and authors of the law at the same time. The state imposes a set of laws and regulations that limit citizens’ behavior. Citizens are required to follow these laws (so long as they are just) even if they don’t agree with them or didn’t vote for the politicians in power. This does not constitute a gross limitation of autonomy because citizens give these laws to themselves, responsible for creating those laws and regulations to which they are bound. The politicians who deliberate about and vote on pieces of legislation are themselves citizens and are voted into power by citizens. Those not in public office engage in public deliberation, which affects not just what interests are represented but also who is voted into office and ultimately what legislation is passed. Public deliberation includes private political discussions amongst friends, or within social groups formed with political action in mind, public marches or protests and demonstrations, blogs and other written discussions online, and discussions on other forms of media (like journalistic endeavors); all trying to answer the question, “How should we live together and organize our communities?”
If we consider deliberation as one of the means through which citizens exercise their popular sovereignty then any circumstances that involves the limitation of someone’s ability to equally participate within such deliberative processes should be considered to be potentially unjust. This includes the public and social structures (as well as the individual actions that take place within them) that directly place obstacles to participation in people’s way. Everyone has a right to participation parity because it is only when participation parity is met that citizens can truly be said to be authors of the law.
By participation parity I have in mind a citizen’s right to an equal opportunity to engage in public, political deliberation. If everyone has an equal right to engage in public deliberation then if someone chooses to participate then she deserves to do so as a peer or as a respected member of the political community. Without such respect or recognition full participation is impossible. Therefore, everyone also has the right to pursue those things that are required to be capable of acting as fully functioning members of the political community (like self esteem and social prestige as well as other things like an education or a stable source of income). Given that this is a right everyone must be given an equal opportunity to pursue these goods if they wish.
I ultimately argue both that justice demands that participation parity is encouraged and protected by the state and that such parity demands that participants within deliberation exercise a wide range of very demanding civic virtues, virtues like beneficence, justice, and decency. Given the nature of how we become virtuous and how these virtues are necessary to participating in deliberations that often take place within our private lives, I also argue that we should consider principles of justice to not only apply to political or social structures but also to cultures and individual actions within those cultures as well. That is, cultures, individuals, and individual actions should be considered to be just or unjust.
Some principles of justice, like those involving the large scale distribution of social or economic goods, can only be enacted through political and social institutions. However, these kinds of principles cannot be easily applied to the social network or culture of a particular community that is composed solely of individual, autonomous actions. But because culture plays a large role in granting or restricting access to the arena of public discourse I argue that it doesn’t make sense to limit justice to public institutions. Rather we must also consider the people, their actions, and relationships with others that constitute that culture as just or unjust. This calls for a different kind of justice, one that can be applied to individuals and their actions. Through various case studies, I show that culture and private actions can directly contribute to an individual’s ability to participate within the deliberative process. If this is the case, and access to private deliberation is necessary to secure freedom from state oppression then, I argue, the state has an obligation to provide incentives to change such environments to better support participation parity.
If this is true, and the state has a duty to prevent instances of injustice, then the scope of justified state intervention should be much wider than liberal political positions like Libertarianism or even Political Liberalism contend. I argue that if this is the case, then Republicanism, and its conception of liberty as non-domination, because it allows for greater state intervention and also because it can accommodate thicker conceptions of the good, can better respond to individual injustices than other liberal theories.
In the future, I would like to continue my research on the concept of justice (what exactly is needed for justice, for example, is it positive or negative: does justice require the absence of something like government interference or does justice demand that citizens have positive capabilities like the ability to participate in the making of the laws that bind them) as well as what appropriate state intervention in the private lives of its citizens looks like. Is it even useful to have such a distinction (between private and public spheres) given how the actions taken within the private lives of citizens can directly impact how effectively they and other citizens can participate in the public deliberative process. Finally, I would like to work more in the field of educational research to think more about what exactly civic virtue education needs to look like in order to effectively instill the virtues within future citizens that are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of the state.
Sample Papers: