Religious Establishment According to a Substantive Ethics of Political Justice

Contemporary political theorists often disagree on whether or not religious establishment is justified in liberal states, even when its existence does not constitute a hindrance to the basic rights of citizens. In this article, I contend that religious established does not raise issues of democratic legitimacy, by showing that political frameworks of justice are entangled with substantive conceptions of the good and ethical forms of life. Then, drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s latest works on the relationship between religion and the public sphere, and Maeve Cooke’s readings thereof, I argue that religious symbols can contribute to the creation of meaningful imaginaries that inform moral norms and principles of justice. After this, I recall Axel Honneth’s conception of “struggles for recognition”, demonstrating that the recognition of specific collective traits, including religious, is necessary to provide citizens with a sense of worth and esteem.

Science & Justice: The Trouble and the Promise

Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting trust in institutions has led to significant changes in the organization and funding of research and education. These changes have troubled the very foundations of universities, but they also have created new opportunities to re-imagine and re-form practices of knowledge production, a key concern of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) and feminist science studies (FSS). Here we reflect on how these changing institutional landscapes as well as increased demands for substantive ethics training create openings for novel institutional practices that embody core insights of S&TS and FSS. Specifically, we describe the creation of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at University of California, Santa Cruz. Taking its inspiration from recent feminist science studies re-workings of responsibility as response-ability, the SJTP created novel pedagogical and research practices that enabled collaboration across all divisions of the University. A focus on justice proved critical to our efforts. In its call to attend to the first principles that shape collective life, justice allowed us to open up the space of research ethics in novel ways, and helped us to create the basis for working across disciplines on shared problems and objects. As S&TS and FSS increasingly move toward generating new modes of gathering and practices of care, we suggest that justice might open up models of collectivity that fit better with the current zeitgeist and produce the kind of responsive knowledge and institutions long imagined.

Human agency and the curriculum

It is generally supposed that a curriculum should engage students with worthwhile knowledge, which requires an understanding of what it means for something to be worthwhile: a substantive conception of the good. Yet a number of influential curriculum theories deny or undermine one or another aspect of the key assumption upon which a meaningful account of the good depends - that people are the agents of their own beliefs, desires and actions. This renders a significant encounter between the curriculum and substantive ethics highly problematic. In this article I explore the meeting between curriculum and human agency in four seminal curriculum theories, and offer a framework to engage the curriculum with this key concept of substantive ethics.