When
The Department of Philosophy's first colloquium of the year will be next Friday, 9/15, by Kaveh Pourvand (Arizona, Center for the Study of Freedom), entitled "State Authority and the Problem of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy", with the following abstract:
Many theories of state legitimacy have an improvement condition – coercive state authority is legitimate only if it solves problems that individuals cannot by themselves. Whether this condition is met depends on how competent citizens are at solving problems. This article’s contribution is centred on the observation that state authority and citizen capacity for self-governance are not independent variables. Reliance on state authority might deprive citizens of the opportunity and incentive to learn to govern themselves. Consequently, the improvement condition might be met in only a circular way: state authority maintains its superiority over self-governance only by preventing citizens from developing their capacity for self-governance.
I argue it is morally troubling when state authority meets the improvement condition in this way and outline two possible responses. We should abolish state authority if we think self-governance capacities could improve at a reasonable transition cost. Alternatively, we should retain such policies but regard them ambivalently as only quasi-legitimate. The paper concludes that good government strikes a balance between helping citizens and facilitating the circumstances where they learn to help themselves.
Here is Kaveh's website: https://www.kavehpourvand.com/
The colloquium will be in the Maloney Seminar Room, Social Sciences 224, from 3pm-5pm.