A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy: Finding. Our Way by D. Don ... government[s] ought to do' when confronted ... concerns the obligation of government to act.
Book Reviews does not invalidate the intent to mounting a civilization which inhibits injustice notoriously (p. xxiv). While it leaves out a great deal, this volume does a great service towards highlighting the work that is already ongoing in the spirit of that sentiment. Bryant William Sculos (Florida International University)
Do All Persons Have Equal Moral Worth: On ‘Basic Equality’ and Equal Respect and Concern by Uwe Steinhoff (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 219pp., £50.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780198719502
This collection addresses the question of ‘basic equality’: of why it is (or is not) that all human beings are in some sense fundamentally equal. Until recently, basic equality was widely taken for granted in (especially) liberal political theory, but it has come under increasing scrutiny. Unfortunately, attempts to locate some quality (or range of qualities) in virtue of which humans are basic equals appear repeatedly to fail. There is a pressing need for justification for a previously axiomatic premise. At present, there are two roughly opposite responses to the situation, with a range of intermediary positions between: attempt to find some feature that passes the tests and yields grounds for basic equality; or give up on it as mistaken or chimerical. After an insightful, if difficult, conceptual ground-clearing by Christopher Nathan, which establishes that a position on basic equality must necessarily assume certain methodological outlooks on the role of norms, the essays in this collection fall at different points on the spectrum. George Sher, Thomas Christiano and Stefan Gosepath attempt new variations on old arguments to establish basic equality: either the possession of consciousness, or the Kantian claim that autono- mous agents owe duties of reciprocation. Unfortunately, considerations levelled by other contributors indicate that these new variations fail. Héctor Wittwer and Jan Narveson, in very different ways, attempt
77 to scale back the demands made on the idea of basic equality, but largely in the service of arguments about the coherence of egalitarianism(s) more generally. Uwe Steinhoff engages in an aggressive assault on the belief that there is any sense in talk of basic equality at all – but is tripped up by what seem to this reviewer very elementary conflations between ‘basic equality’ and the dictum of ‘equal concern and respect’, and a failure to grasp what the aspiration to basic equality is about for contemporary theorists. The two most interesting essays are by Jiwei Ci and Richard Arneson. Ci suggests that the human desire for recognition, combined with modern consumerist economics, may generate inescapably inegalitarian outcomes, and this sits in deep tension with commitments to basic equality. Arneson deftly summarises the present dead-end of the literature. No arguments for basic equality currently work, but that is not something we should be happy or complacent about: ‘In this area of thought, the available alternative positions are all bad. Choose your poison’ (p. 52). The paradox of this collection is that it makes a worthwhile contribution, while getting us no closer to satisfactory answers. Paul Sagar (King’s College, Cambridge) A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy: Finding Our Way by D. Don Welch. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. 156pp., £26.99 (p/b), ISBN 9781138013797
In few (if any) realms is the now well-established and extensively examined ‘ought/is’ dilemma of more practical significance to a greater number of people than in the arena of public policy. It is through public policy that governments decide both which societal goals to pursue and how to (best) pursue them – essentially, deciding, in the famous maxim of Harold Laswell, ‘who gets what, when, [and] how’. The fundamental purpose of this pithy and extremely engaging book is ‘to offer a framework for answering questions about what … government[s] ought to do’ when confronted
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with increasingly complex policy dilemmas that involve competing moral values (p. 1). Don Welch cautions (p. 2) that he is not seeking to provide definitive answers to such questions, but rather to supply the tools needed ‘to improve the quality of individual and collective deliberation about our responses’ and, in so doing, ‘establish a sure footing for ethical reflection about public policy decision making’. As Welch correctly notes (p. 2), discussions concerning how to most effectively respond to policy dilemmas are at their heart ‘moral conversation[s]’. Welch identifies (p. 2) in turn the following five ‘benchmarks’ ‘to be used in the moral evaluation of public policy: Benefit, Effectiveness, Fairness, Fidelity and Legitimacy’. The initial two reflect a concern that governments pursue policies that effectively generate benefits (and avoid harms). Fairness requires that policies distribute benefits and burdens in a just manner, while fidelity concerns the obligation of government to act respectfully towards all those affected by its actions; and legitimacy captures judgements about the appropriateness of government serving as the instrument to address the dilemma in question. Welch contends (p. 2) that empirical evidence suggests that those benchmarks are the focus of ‘a broad-based national consensus … [concerning] what we as a nation want government to do’ (he is referring to the citizens of the United States, but it does not seem unreasonable to presume that his conclusions would be equally applicable to other contemporary liberal democracies). Importantly, Welch emphasises (p. 3) that the insertion of ethics into public policy decision-making does not necessitate that policymakers engage in ‘endless quixotic quests’, but requires only that they ‘look past how things are and are likely to be, and … consider how things ought to be’ (emphasis added). A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy presents a readily accessible yet analytically rigorous argument that wonderfully illuminates the critical relationship between ethics and public policy. Shaun P. Young (University of Toronto)
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International Relations The End of American World Order by Amitav Acharya. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. 157pp., £14.99 (p/b), ISBN 9780745672489
Amitav Acharya’s The End of American World Order belongs to a new wave of scholarship on American Decline that arose after the financial crisis in 2008. In this debate, few works are as lucid as Acharya’s book. It introduces the notion of the ‘Multiplex World’ as a non-Western-centric academic approach in the world order debate. Arguing against the continuation of American supremacy and the prolongation of American hegemonic institutions, the author presents a compelling argument that the future world order does not depend on the question of US decline. What matters is that the American World Order is declining. An analogy to the multiplex cinema, the Multiplex World offers different movies, from different producers, in different size theatres, at the same time (pp. 7–8). Therefore, the Multiplex World is very diverse, decentralised and much more complex than Joseph Nye’s three-dimensional chess board, as put forward in his 2002 book The Paradox of American Power. According to that argument, US unipolarity is only one film in the multiplex compound, much like the continuation of US hegemony through international institutions. Yet alongside these two ideas, these blockbusters, as Acharya puts it, there are also Bollywood movies and films from other rising powers’ production units – alternative and low budget, regional and topic-specific, hits and flops (p. 7). All these world order visions coexist and interplay. Acharya presents four dimensions of such a Multiplex World: power (great powers, rising powers), geographic scope (regional orders, global institutions), leadership (legitimacy) and time (unable to replicate the past world orders). Comparing different cultural-historic perceptions of hierarchy in the East and West, the author portrays different approaches to global governance. He argues
