Ben Cross’s research while affiliated with Wuhan University and other places

Recent empirical literature suggests that some of the most prominent environmental policies that the Chinese government has pursued have involved at least some measure of participation from citizens. These findings suggest that at least some political authorities in China believe that effective environmental policies will require more participation. However, since the accounts of political legitimacy promulgated by the Chinese government have been developed in order to downplay the need for greater participation (at least in a liberal-democratic form), it is unclear whether these accounts of legitimacy can allow space for the kind of participation that successful environmental politics demands. In this article, I use a realist approach to political legitimacy to address this question. I argue that the dominant legitimation narratives in Chinese politics provide the government with legitimacy-related reasons to allow greater citizen participation in environmental politics, but also provide it with other legitimacy-related reasons to restrict participation.

In a recent article, J. Angelo Corlett criticises what he takes to be the ‘offensiphobic’ practices characteristic of many universities. The ‘offensiphobe’, according to Corlett, believes that offensive speech ought to be censured precisely because it offends. We argue that there are three serious problems with Corlett’s discussion. First, his criticism of ‘offensiphobia’ misrepresents the kinds of censorship practiced by universities; many universities may in some way censure speech which they regard as offensive, but this is seldom if ever a manifestation of ‘offensiphobia’. Second, we attempt to reconstruct Corlett’s criticism of ‘offensiphobia’ as a criticism of the practice of censuring hate speech, and show that this argument is unsuccessful. Third, we offer some brief reflections on how labelling universities as ‘offensiphobic’ is especially problematic in light of the current climate of political interference in university research and teaching.

Most theorists of public reason, including both its proponents and critics, now accept that it is inconclusive, meaning that its correct application can result in a plurality of reasonable solutions to the issues it addresses. While some early critics argued that the inconclusiveness of public reason presented a serious problem for political legitimacy – a charge often associated with ‘the completeness objection’ – defenders of public reason have generally dismissed this objection on the grounds that political legitimacy does not hinge on the selection of a singularly reasonable or most reasonable resolution to political disputes. We argue, however, that once the notion of political legitimacy accepted by prominent public reason theorists has been successfully disambiguated, the inconclusiveness of public reason is far more problematic than public reason theorists have acknowledged.

Many have argued that deliberative democracy has, at best, an uncomfortable relationship with activism. It might be thought that deliberative democracy faces an inescapable dilemma: either restrict activist conduct in ways that might exacerbate real-world injustices, or restrict its normative claims to the realm of ideal theory, making it largely irrelevant to the real world. The idea of a deliberative system, however, may seem capable of handling this dilemma. By focusing on the quality of deliberation at the macro-level, deliberative systems theory (DST) does not require that activists must rely exclusively, or even primarily on deliberation. Additionally, DST suggests a kind of deliberative criteria according to which activist conduct can be assessed in the here and now. In this article, I assess the extent to which DST really is able to avoid this dilemma. I do not think it is impossible for DST to do so; however, I argue that it can avoid the dilemma by presupposing a broadly optimistic picture of the world. If we reject this picture, the relevance of DST and deliberative democratic theory in general for activists will be severely limited.

According to Bernard Williams' “anti‐tyranny argument,” it is important for citizens to have access to true information about the exercise of political power in order to check the tendency of governments and politicians to become tyrannous. Although Williams thinks the argument is one of the better arguments for the importance of truthfulness in politics, he acknowledges 2 limitations. First, it appears to offer little more than the truism that tyranny is a bad thing—a truism that will be accepted by all but tyrants themselves. Second, it may not offer any reasons for the importance of true information about forms of political power, which do not seem tyrannous. I argue that kind of political analysis required to apply the anti‐tyranny argument enables it to overcome both limitations. In so doing, I show that it has a clear advantage over rival arguments for the importance of truthfulness in politics.

The idea that a person might have a duty to defer to the moral judgments of others is typically something that arouses our suspicion, in ways that other kinds of deference do not. One explanation for this is the value of autonomy. According to this explanation, people have a duty to be autonomous, and any act of deferring to another person’s moral judgement is not an autonomous action. Call this “the Autonomy Argument” against moral deference. In this article, I criticise the Autonomy Argument. I argue that, even if we accept that an act of moral deference can never be autonomous, those who believe that people have a duty to be autonomous must accept that acts of moral deference are morally necessary. This is because some people are incapable of becoming autonomous by themselves, and deferring to a moral expert is the only way they might ever become autonomous.

Many political realists reject the idea that the first task for political philosophy is to justify the existence of coercive political institutions (CPIs). Instead, they say, we should begin with the factual existence of CPIs, and ask how they ought to be structured. In holding this view, they adopt a form of political naturalism that is broadly Aristotelian in character. In this article, I distinguish between two forms that this political naturalism might take ‐ what I call a ‘strong’ form, and a ‘weak’ form ‐ and argue that both ought to be rejected.1 1 I would like to thank Enzo Rossi for his helpful and generous feedback on earlier drafts of this article.