I agree with this comment—thanks! A follow up: can you say why political theorists accept high stakes instrumentalism (as opposed to stating that they do)? It sounds like this is effectively a re-run of familiar debates between consequentialists and non-consequentialists (e.g. “can you kill one to save five? what about killing one to save a million?”), just wrapped in different language, so I’m wondering if something else is going on. I suppose I’m a bit surprised the view has no detractors—I imagine there are some (Kant?) who would hold the seemingly equivalent view you can never kill one to save any number of others.
Hi Michael, I was also surprised! I think the basic intuition is that people want to avoid sanctioning the tyranny of the majority. Philosophers think it would be unjust for the majority to violate the basic rights of minorities. As I argue in the paper, democracies do this all the time. Lots of philosophers who are at pains to emphasise their democrat credentials are also in favour of the US Supreme Court for this reason—it doesn’t get much more undemocratic than that.
The two main arguments for intrinsic proceduralism are from autonomy and from equal respect/basic equality. It is usually held that people’s rights to act autonomously stop at the rights of others. No-one holds that people have a right grounded in autonomy to pursue the project of killing minorities. On equal respect/basic equality, I have a hard time understanding how it is an argument rather than merely a restatement of the claim that intrinsic proceduralism is true: in spite of basic equality, there are lots of rights and powers we distribute unequally, such as the right to practice medicine or drive.
I agree with this comment—thanks! A follow up: can you say why political theorists accept high stakes instrumentalism (as opposed to stating that they do)? It sounds like this is effectively a re-run of familiar debates between consequentialists and non-consequentialists (e.g. “can you kill one to save five? what about killing one to save a million?”), just wrapped in different language, so I’m wondering if something else is going on. I suppose I’m a bit surprised the view has no detractors—I imagine there are some (Kant?) who would hold the seemingly equivalent view you can never kill one to save any number of others.
Hi Michael, I was also surprised! I think the basic intuition is that people want to avoid sanctioning the tyranny of the majority. Philosophers think it would be unjust for the majority to violate the basic rights of minorities. As I argue in the paper, democracies do this all the time. Lots of philosophers who are at pains to emphasise their democrat credentials are also in favour of the US Supreme Court for this reason—it doesn’t get much more undemocratic than that.
The two main arguments for intrinsic proceduralism are from autonomy and from equal respect/basic equality. It is usually held that people’s rights to act autonomously stop at the rights of others. No-one holds that people have a right grounded in autonomy to pursue the project of killing minorities. On equal respect/basic equality, I have a hard time understanding how it is an argument rather than merely a restatement of the claim that intrinsic proceduralism is true: in spite of basic equality, there are lots of rights and powers we distribute unequally, such as the right to practice medicine or drive.