Introduction to the guest edited section: world government

In this introduction, I first present the general problematic of the special section. Our world faces several existential challenges (climate change, threat of (nuclear) war, and global injustice) and some would argue (with even more disagreeing) that the only adequate answer to these challenges is setting up a world government. I then introduce the contributions that comprise the scholarly body of the special section: Andri? on global democracy; Hahn on global political reconciliation; Pinheiro Walla on Kant and world government; Miklós &; Tanyi on institutional consequentialism and world governance. Lastly, I briefly describe the practical context in which the idea of the special section has arisen and in which the present contributions have taken shape.     

African philosophy and global epistemic injustice

In this paper, I consider how the discourse on global epistemic justice might be approached differently if some contributions from the African philosophical place are taken seriously. To be specific, I argue that the debate on global justice broadly has not been global. I cite as an example, the exclusion or marginalisation of African philosophy, what it has contributed and what it may yet contribute to the global epistemic edifice. I point out that this exclusion is a case of epistemic injustice. I observe that the absence of a philosophical technique that prevails on philosophers to engage with others from other traditions might be responsible for this epistemic lopsidedness and marginalisation. I go beyond the re-statement of this problem of marginalisation of African philosophy to point out relevant doctrines from the African place. I show how they are united under the methodological and ideological disposition of conversationalism. I argue that this ideology might be a better model for realising the goal of global epistemic justice which is the overcoming of all forms of exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses through fair allocation of intellectual spaces.     

The effects of social injustice and inequality on children's moral judgments and behavior: Towards a theoretical model

Our goal in this paper is to examine the potential origins of children's understanding of morally relevant transgressions, with a particular focus on how children's perceptions of both proximal and distal unfairness might influence their social reasoning and behavior. A preliminary theoretical model is presented that addresses connections among aggressive children's social cognitive biases, their attachment histories, and their working models of societal justice and fairness. It is argued that difficulties in early parent–child interactions in combination with hostile larger social environments act to undermine emotional reciprocity, empathy, and concern for others in ways likely to promote proactive, uncaring forms of victimization and harm. Furthermore, it is proposed that given sufficiently toxic social experiences, some children will develop beliefs that life does not primarily revolve around caring or fairness, but around power and domination. Discussion focuses on the potential implications of these non-normative but coherent moral beliefs for theory and intervention.     

Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression.     

A Theology of the Cross for South Africa

This article seeks to investigate in what ways the Lutheran theologia crucis - when brought into dialogue with the South African historical-political context - can be of epistemological as well as pastoral significance for the people of South Africa. South Africa is a nation in the process of coming to terms with a traumatic past of violence, oppression, suffering and injustice. In order for healing and reconciliation to occur, people must find some kind of meaning in the story of the past, and indeed must find the seeds of hope and new beginnings in this story. This article argues that the story of South Africa can be likened to a story of the cross, and that the God of South Africans can be identified as the God of the cross, the Deus absconditus who is mysteriously and paradoxically revealed in suffering and injustice. In identifying the God of the cross as their God, and seeing their story as a story of the cross, South Africans may also anticipate theirs to be(come) a story of the resurrection and of new life.     

Principled ideology or racism: Why do modern racists oppose race-based social justice programs?

People who score high on modern racism scales consistently oppose reparations for race-based social injustices. Scholars debate whether this opposition reflects racism [e.g., Sears, D. O., & Henry, P. J. (2005). Over thirty years later: A contemporary look at symbolic racism. In M.P Zanna, (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 37 (pp. 95-150). San Diego, CA: Elsevier Academic Press] or a principled conservative ideology [e.g., Sniderman, P. M., & Tetlock, P. E. (1986). Symbolic racism: Problems of motive attribution in political analysis. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 129-150]. We tested these competing hypotheses by examining support for government reparations for adult survivors of childhood abuse. We manipulated whether the survivors were of European or Aboriginal heritage. Consistent with a racism hypothesis, high modern racists indicated less support for reparations when the survivors were of Aboriginal heritage than when the survivors were of European heritage. Interestingly, low modern racists supported reparations more for Aboriginal Canadian than European Canadian survivors. We discuss three explanations of the responses of low modern racists.     

RACE, IDEOLOGY, AND IDEAL THEORY

Abstract: Philosophers who have addressed the problems of enduring racial injustice have been suspicious of the role played by ideal theory in ethics and political philosophy generally, and in contemporary liberal political philosophy in particular. The theoretical marginalization of race in the work of Rawls has led some to charge that ideal theory is at the very least unhelpful in understanding one of the most significant forms of contemporary injustice, and is at worst ideological in the pejorative sense. To explore these concerns, I formulate five related criticisms of ideal theory and examine each as it would be applied to Rawls's political philosophy. My thesis is that the strongest criticisms—namely, that ideal theory is essentially ideological and cannot provide adequate grounds for justifying race-conscious, equality-securing measures—ultimately miss the mark. But other criticisms of ideal theory are more plausible, and most plausibly directed to an area of Rawls's thought often ignored in discussions of liberalism and race, namely, his account of citizenship and public reasoning.     

Cognitive colonialism: Nationality bias in Brazilian academic philosophy

This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to test for nationality bias among members of the Brazilian philosophical community. Faculty members and postgraduate students from philosophy departments at seven Brazilian universities evaluated texts attributed to authors of European and Latin American nationalities. Results showed a clear preference for French nationality over Brazilian. They were inconclusive, however, when contrasting other Latin American nationalities with European nationalities, which likely relates to the academic background of the participants. These overall results support the claim that Brazilian academic philosophers are highly critical of Brazilians who produce theories of their own. The paper calls on philosophers to carefully consider the ways in which Eurocentrism impacts their very ability to reason.     

There's a certain slant of light: Three attitudes toward the political turn in analytic philosophy

There has been a growing interest within analytic philosophy in addressing political and social issues, which has been referred to as the “political turn” in the discipline. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it discusses the very characterization of the political turn. In particular, it introduces the definition proposed by Bordonaba-Plou, Fernández-Castro, and Torices, suggests that we should not consider the turn a form of activism, and explores an additional benefit of the ideal/nonideal distinction for characterizing the turn. Second, it addresses the concern of what attitude we should take in the face of the different sensitivities we might have with respect to what constitutes an injustice. Which philosophical works should count as part of the political turn? The paper explores three different attitudes toward this dilemma, and favors what it calls the revisionist attitude, which emphasizes the fact that our perception of injustice is subject to error.     

Structural linguistic injustice

This paper develops a concept of structural linguistic injustice. By employing the so-called structural-injustice approach, it argues that individuals' seemingly harmless language attitudes and language choices might enable serious harms on a collective level, constituting what one could call a structural linguistic injustice. Section 1 introduces the linguistic-justice debate. By doing so, it establishes linguistic diversity as the context in which phenomena such as individuals' language attitudes, language choice, and language loss occur. Moreover, the paper illustrates why employing the structural-injustice approach might be beneficial for the linguistic-justice debate. Section 2 conceptualizes individuals' (certain types of) language attitudes and language choice as (objectionable) social structures. Section 3 provides a concept of structural linguistic injustice. Section 4 suggests one possible remedy for structural linguistic injustice. Section 5 concludes the paper.