Must the Subaltern Speak Publicly?
Political Liberalism and the Ethics of Fighting Severe InjusticeAlasia Nuti (University of York) Friday, September 30, 12:00 p.m. (ET)Online via Zoom
Abstract
The victims of severe injustice, but no other group in society, are allowed to employ disruption and violence to seek political change. This article argues for this conclusion from within Rawlsian political liberalism, which, however, has been criticised for allegedly imposing public reason’s suffocating norms of civility on the oppressed. It develops a novel view of the applicability of public reason in non-ideal circumstances – the ‘no self-sacrificed view’ – that is focused on the excessive costs of following public reason when suffering from severe injustice. On this view, those treated in what Rawls describes as less than a reasonably just way are relieved of the duty of public reason and therefore entitled to employ disruption and violence. Turning to the requirements that actually apply to the oppressed, the article also shows that, when properly developed, political liberalism offers original and nuanced normative guidance on how to fight severe injustice uncivilly.
Speaker Bio
Alasia Nuti is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Political Theory at the University of York. She received her PhD, which was awarded the Elizabeth Wiskemann Prize for the Study of Inequality and Social Justice from the Political Studies Association, from the University of Cambridge. Her first book “Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Injustice, Gender, and Redress” (Cambridge University Press, 2019) received the Honourable Mention from the ECPR Prize in Political Theory in 2021. In 2022, Alasia was awarded the Early Career Prize from the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought. She is currently working on a monograph (Oxford University Press, under contract) on a revised account of political liberalism and the task of containment, which is co-authored with Gabriele Badano.
You are also welcome to attend an upcoming event at the Graduate Center that was co-organized by some of our CGEP fellows: Feminism in Crisis? Philosophical Interventions, CUNY Graduate Student Conference, Oct. 1, 2022, 9am-6pm, Room 5414, and online. Robin Dembroff (Yale University) will keynote. Register to attend here.
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