PhD Research Proposal

Aims and Objectives:

I propose to critically examine modes of public justification for ethics of capability, and assess
their prospects as contributions to normative debate in increasingly de-localised spaces of
practice. In particular, I shall examine the role that metaethical concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘reality’
play in such justifications, and assess their differing effects. In pursuing this research I hope to
vindicate an approach, based on the ethics of capability, which can provide some of the resources
for engagement in public justifications of the kind that de-localised normative practice requires.

Context and Importance:

There is a problem which has not often been addressed in metaethics, but seems to be relevant to
it. The problem is this: how are we to provide for a public mode of justification that will be
effective in grounding normative practice, in environments of such apparent heterogeneity of
values and modes of normative engagement? Call this Publicity with Heterogeneity, or PwH.
This problem is inevitably faced by any metaethical theory that has practical implications.
However, it seems to be particularly problematic for metaethical realists who take a particular
tack. Over the past thirty years, one noteworthy form of realism has detailed a view of normative
practice as a space into which individuals are inducted via a process of habituation, much like that
presented by Aristotle. PwH looks so problematic here because the spaces of normative practice
that individuals are engaged with are necessarily partial against the vast background of
interpersonal relationships that are possible and/or necessary today. Powerful justifications in one
space may be entirely impotent in another.

PwH is an instance of a tension within contemporary normative philosophy between the idea that
practical reason is an autonomous, irreducible domain with a specific relationship to the
individual agent-practitioner, and the need for normative discourse that can effectively cross lines
of religion, gender etc. In terms of ‘public reason’ this tension is that between the need for
publicity of normative practice, and the necessity that norms remain close enough to any involved
individual to ‘speak’ to them. Modes of practice that are too ‘thick’ will be incapable of providing
reasons to all relevant agents (in the maximal case, all citizens of the world); those that are too
‘thin’ will fail adequately to provide reasons for any such agent. Key instances of arguments
against the former would be John Rawls’ arguments for a ‘political’ rather than ‘metaphysical’
liberalism, and those of any political philosophy that puts weight on the idea of the neutrality of
the liberal state; against the latter Bernard Williams’ critique of Kantian and Rawlsian accounts
alike, and Michael Sandel’s attack on the liberalism of the ‘unencumbered self’.

The kind of ‘capability’ account that Martha Nussbaum proposes promises to steer between the
extremes of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ in working towards a solution to the tension, and to PwH.
Alternative versions of ‘capability’ theory have been suggested to be apt to do the work required
here. Nussbaum has proposed Rawlsian ‘political-liberal’ and Aristotelian ‘essentialist’ variants
of her theory in this regard. These variants in turn could be fleshed out in multiple ways,
implicating many controversial metaethical issues. In particular, the influence of concepts of
naturalism and realism within such variants will be essential to their success or failure both in
terms of theoretical cogency and practical efficacy.
My research will be rooted in the idea that certain of the main theses of the ‘Aristotelian turn’,
which may seem so problematic for radically non-local politics, may actually provide a useful
means of thinking about the issues in question, and as such help to provide for as good a synoptic
approach as we can create. Chief among these are the approach to meta-ethics of John McDowell,
and the ‘natural goodness’ account of Philippa Foot. My sense that these approaches may be
especially fruitful relies on the idea that by focussing our attention on the ‘thick’ and local they
may support more successful ‘thin’ practice. That is, by realising that our normative space cannot
but be local in its specifics, we will engage in discourse with those further away explicitly and
from the start in terms of the locally-specified elements of the normative space that are shared (or
around which there is a large degree of confluence). Juxtaposed against this approach is a
paradigm based on Rawls that sees the solution here as one of creating an institutional
‘overlapping consensus’ above, rather than within, local commitment.

By examining variations on the basic ‘political-liberal’ and ‘essentialist’ frameworks that

Nussbaum has implicated, and paying particular attention to the work that metaethical
conceptions of reality and nature do within them, I hope to contribute to the understanding of the
relationship between metaethics and normative theory in these areas, and in particular to the
prospects of broadly Aristotelian theory for addressing the problem of PwH.

Research Methods and Questions:

Primary research question:

What are the prospects of modes of public justification for ethics of capability?

Sub-questions:
1.
1.1. What concepts of reality and Realism are implicated by ‘political-liberal’ and
‘essentialist’ groundings for ethics of capability?
1.2. What concepts of nature and Naturalism are implicated by ‘political-liberal’ and
‘essentialist’ groundings for ethics of capability?
1.3. How are these metaethical theses bound up with what they ground?
1.4. Which kinds of justification are more cogent in the light of this metaethical analysis?
2.
2.1. What is the contemporary state of play with regard to heterogeneity – what is the scale
of the differences that any public mode of justification must account for?
2.2. Do current capability accounts provide for this effectively?
2.3. Which kinds of capability account look most promising in this regard?
3.
3.1. How do strands 1 and 2 tie together – what is the influence of meta-ethical elements on
publicity-theoretic ones?
3.2. Which mode of justification does best on this analysis?
4. What more general lessons could be drawn?

This project will involve standard philosophical and political-theoretic methods including textual
exegesis and reconstruction, critical theoretical analysis, assessment of contextual factors, and the
construction of arguments.