Research Areas
1. Public Justification and Public Reason
The state imposes laws that coercively define the terms of our common life. Liberals believe that those laws must be (in some sense) justified to all citizens. Yet liberal polities are marked by the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ – citizens endorse a great variety of conceptions of the good, or worldviews. This raises the question of how laws can be justified to all. What kinds of reasons or values must be used to justify laws, in the face of our many moral, philosophical, and religious disagreements?
Many political philosophers answer this question by appeal to the ideas of ‘public justification’ and ‘public reason’. They hold that laws must be justified to all citizens by reasons that they can accept, and that this is achieved by the provision of a special class of reasons (‘public reasons’) that can be accepted by all reasonable citizens. My DPhil thesis defended the first claim but rejected the second. Laws should be justified to all by reasons that they can accept, but these justifications need not appeal to ‘shared values’ or any special class of reasons. Laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons rooted in their diverse worldviews. This view is known as the ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism. In the thesis I developed and defended a distinctive version of this view.
I have published numerous articles relating to these debates (see publications page), and continue to work on them. In a recent article (here), Tony Taylor and I develop a framework for analysing and assessing public reason views. We argue that despite their diversity, all such views have a common structure, and understanding that structure casts important light on many of the claims and arguments made within the literature.
I have a particular interest in the place of religious contributions to public deliberation, and will explore this in detail in a forthcoming book entitled Does Faith Belong in Politics?: A Debate, which is under contract with Routledge. The book will be in 'debate format'; Marilie Coetsee and I will each lay out our own position in opening essays and then respond to one another's arguments in the latter part of the book.
I have also organised several workshops and events related to this research, including two MANCEPT workshops (2015 and 2016) and a conference focused on Matthew Kramer's Liberalism with Excellence (OUP, 2017), which I hosted at Christ Church in June 2017. The conference speakers included many prominent contributors to the debate (listed here), and most of the papers presented at the conference have since been published as a special issue of The American Journal of Jurisprudence (available here).
2. State Value-Promotion, Transformative Liberalism, and Religious Liberty
The state does not only impose laws. Its pronouncements and actions also influence the beliefs and values that citizens hold. Reasonable pluralism poses challenges here too. Given the extent of principled disagreement among citizens, what values (if any) can the state permissibly seek to promote? Can the state permissibly seek to inculcate, or indeed oppose, any particular beliefs among the citizenry? If so, what means may permissibly be used for these ends?
These questions are the starting point for my second main research project. Recently, several theorists have defended a view that I call ‘transformative liberalism’. On this view, the state should indeed seek to shape citizens beliefs in certain ways – including through its education policy, funding decisions, and decisions about what groups merit charitable status.
I argue that the state’s permissible role in promoting liberal values is more limited than advocates of transformative liberalism believe. In part, this is because these views fluctuate between different understandings of the values that the state ought to promote. Official statements of these values present them as fairly minimal and basic liberal values. In practice, however, thicker, more contestable ideas tend to be invoked – ideas that conflict with various worldviews endorsed by citizens within liberal democracies. Further, transformative liberalism runs into particular problems with regard to religion. It inevitably ends up being involved in complex theological adjudication, despite political liberals believing that the state should not be entangled in such disputes. In some cases, it might seem to imply that many religious individuals simply cannot be good liberal citizens. I have made these arguments in my article in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (here) and my chapter in a recent edited collection (available here).
This research also connects to questions concerning collective religious liberty. When, if at all, should religious groups or organisations enjoy exemptions from otherwise applicable laws, which permit them to engage in illiberal practices? I have published three papers exploring this issue, including a recent article in Legal Theory (here), and plan to write more about it. My article in the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, meanwhile (here), addresses the question of individual religious exemptions, which I also intend to explore further in future work.
3. Engagement with Theology
Unusually for a political theorist, I pursue my research questions in part by interacting with theology, particularly Christian theology. Much recent political theory concerns the role of religion and religious beliefs, yet few theorists have directly examined the work of theologians, who consider similar questions, but from within a theological framework. Engagement with theological literature sheds new light on ongoing disputes within political theory.
In my DPhil thesis, this engagement took the form of considering whether Christians could accept the theories of public justification that I discussed, on the basis of their theology. A chapter from this section of the thesis has since been published in Law and Philosophy (here), and my recent article in Social Theory and Practice (here) addresses this issue further.
In future work I will engage with the arguments of theologians who express concerns about the liberal state’s influence over religion, religious citizens, and civil society more generally. Many argue that political liberalism already has a negative impact on civil society, on intermediate institutions such as families and churches, and ultimately on the moral formation of individual citizens. Transformative liberalism would heighten these concerns. I intend to consider the validity of these critiques, and whether they necessitate changes in political liberal theories.
I organised a workshop bringing together political theorists and theologians to discuss questions of religious diversity and public life and learn from one another's approaches and insights, as part of a major conference on religion and politics held in Oxford in September 2017. More information about the conference can be found here, and information about the workshop here. Many of the papers presented at the workshop have been published in two journal special issues, one in political theory journal Social Theory and Practice (here) and the other in theology journal Political Theology (here). Both special issues contain contributions from scholars from both fields.
4. Public Shaming
I have a growing interest in the rise of 'online public shaming' and the way in which social media is used to regulate people's conduct. Public criticism of wrongdoing is sometimes justified, and can play a vital role in sustaining valuable social norms. Yet targets of online public shaming often face severe consequences: abuse, privacy invasions, humiliation, and losing their jobs. We might also have fears concerning so-called 'chilling effects'. Mill famously warned in On Liberty that the weight of public opinion can be a grave threat to freedom of expression and belief. Arguably, modern technology means that this is particularly the case today.
I co-authored an essay on these themes (with Alastair Colin-Jones), entitled 'The Democratisation of Accountability in the Digital Age: Promise and Pitfalls', which was awarded first prize in the 2016 Robert Davies Memorial Essay Contest, an annual essay competition run by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Saïd Business School.
Since then, Tom Parr and I have published two articles on this topic (here and here). We seek to develop an overarching framework for assessing the justifiability of instances of social-norm-enforcing public shaming, with a particular focus on online shaming. A short video introducing our work can be found here. Tom and I also recently wrote two blog posts: on Justice Everywhere (here), discussing the shaming of those who violate social distancing guidelines during the coronavirus crisis, and on The Ethical War Blog (here), discussing employers' responses to public shaming. The former has since been expanded into a book chapter (here).
Going forward, Tom and I plan to obtain funding to run a project on the morality of online public shaming, which will bring together insights both from an in interdisciplinary group of scholars and non-academic stakeholders such as journalists, think tank researchers, and representatives from social media organisations, to make progress with understanding and tackling the major challenges presented by the phenomenon.
1. Public Justification and Public Reason
The state imposes laws that coercively define the terms of our common life. Liberals believe that those laws must be (in some sense) justified to all citizens. Yet liberal polities are marked by the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ – citizens endorse a great variety of conceptions of the good, or worldviews. This raises the question of how laws can be justified to all. What kinds of reasons or values must be used to justify laws, in the face of our many moral, philosophical, and religious disagreements?
Many political philosophers answer this question by appeal to the ideas of ‘public justification’ and ‘public reason’. They hold that laws must be justified to all citizens by reasons that they can accept, and that this is achieved by the provision of a special class of reasons (‘public reasons’) that can be accepted by all reasonable citizens. My DPhil thesis defended the first claim but rejected the second. Laws should be justified to all by reasons that they can accept, but these justifications need not appeal to ‘shared values’ or any special class of reasons. Laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons rooted in their diverse worldviews. This view is known as the ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism. In the thesis I developed and defended a distinctive version of this view.
I have published numerous articles relating to these debates (see publications page), and continue to work on them. In a recent article (here), Tony Taylor and I develop a framework for analysing and assessing public reason views. We argue that despite their diversity, all such views have a common structure, and understanding that structure casts important light on many of the claims and arguments made within the literature.
I have a particular interest in the place of religious contributions to public deliberation, and will explore this in detail in a forthcoming book entitled Does Faith Belong in Politics?: A Debate, which is under contract with Routledge. The book will be in 'debate format'; Marilie Coetsee and I will each lay out our own position in opening essays and then respond to one another's arguments in the latter part of the book.
I have also organised several workshops and events related to this research, including two MANCEPT workshops (2015 and 2016) and a conference focused on Matthew Kramer's Liberalism with Excellence (OUP, 2017), which I hosted at Christ Church in June 2017. The conference speakers included many prominent contributors to the debate (listed here), and most of the papers presented at the conference have since been published as a special issue of The American Journal of Jurisprudence (available here).
2. State Value-Promotion, Transformative Liberalism, and Religious Liberty
The state does not only impose laws. Its pronouncements and actions also influence the beliefs and values that citizens hold. Reasonable pluralism poses challenges here too. Given the extent of principled disagreement among citizens, what values (if any) can the state permissibly seek to promote? Can the state permissibly seek to inculcate, or indeed oppose, any particular beliefs among the citizenry? If so, what means may permissibly be used for these ends?
These questions are the starting point for my second main research project. Recently, several theorists have defended a view that I call ‘transformative liberalism’. On this view, the state should indeed seek to shape citizens beliefs in certain ways – including through its education policy, funding decisions, and decisions about what groups merit charitable status.
I argue that the state’s permissible role in promoting liberal values is more limited than advocates of transformative liberalism believe. In part, this is because these views fluctuate between different understandings of the values that the state ought to promote. Official statements of these values present them as fairly minimal and basic liberal values. In practice, however, thicker, more contestable ideas tend to be invoked – ideas that conflict with various worldviews endorsed by citizens within liberal democracies. Further, transformative liberalism runs into particular problems with regard to religion. It inevitably ends up being involved in complex theological adjudication, despite political liberals believing that the state should not be entangled in such disputes. In some cases, it might seem to imply that many religious individuals simply cannot be good liberal citizens. I have made these arguments in my article in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (here) and my chapter in a recent edited collection (available here).
This research also connects to questions concerning collective religious liberty. When, if at all, should religious groups or organisations enjoy exemptions from otherwise applicable laws, which permit them to engage in illiberal practices? I have published three papers exploring this issue, including a recent article in Legal Theory (here), and plan to write more about it. My article in the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, meanwhile (here), addresses the question of individual religious exemptions, which I also intend to explore further in future work.
3. Engagement with Theology
Unusually for a political theorist, I pursue my research questions in part by interacting with theology, particularly Christian theology. Much recent political theory concerns the role of religion and religious beliefs, yet few theorists have directly examined the work of theologians, who consider similar questions, but from within a theological framework. Engagement with theological literature sheds new light on ongoing disputes within political theory.
In my DPhil thesis, this engagement took the form of considering whether Christians could accept the theories of public justification that I discussed, on the basis of their theology. A chapter from this section of the thesis has since been published in Law and Philosophy (here), and my recent article in Social Theory and Practice (here) addresses this issue further.
In future work I will engage with the arguments of theologians who express concerns about the liberal state’s influence over religion, religious citizens, and civil society more generally. Many argue that political liberalism already has a negative impact on civil society, on intermediate institutions such as families and churches, and ultimately on the moral formation of individual citizens. Transformative liberalism would heighten these concerns. I intend to consider the validity of these critiques, and whether they necessitate changes in political liberal theories.
I organised a workshop bringing together political theorists and theologians to discuss questions of religious diversity and public life and learn from one another's approaches and insights, as part of a major conference on religion and politics held in Oxford in September 2017. More information about the conference can be found here, and information about the workshop here. Many of the papers presented at the workshop have been published in two journal special issues, one in political theory journal Social Theory and Practice (here) and the other in theology journal Political Theology (here). Both special issues contain contributions from scholars from both fields.
4. Public Shaming
I have a growing interest in the rise of 'online public shaming' and the way in which social media is used to regulate people's conduct. Public criticism of wrongdoing is sometimes justified, and can play a vital role in sustaining valuable social norms. Yet targets of online public shaming often face severe consequences: abuse, privacy invasions, humiliation, and losing their jobs. We might also have fears concerning so-called 'chilling effects'. Mill famously warned in On Liberty that the weight of public opinion can be a grave threat to freedom of expression and belief. Arguably, modern technology means that this is particularly the case today.
I co-authored an essay on these themes (with Alastair Colin-Jones), entitled 'The Democratisation of Accountability in the Digital Age: Promise and Pitfalls', which was awarded first prize in the 2016 Robert Davies Memorial Essay Contest, an annual essay competition run by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Saïd Business School.
Since then, Tom Parr and I have published two articles on this topic (here and here). We seek to develop an overarching framework for assessing the justifiability of instances of social-norm-enforcing public shaming, with a particular focus on online shaming. A short video introducing our work can be found here. Tom and I also recently wrote two blog posts: on Justice Everywhere (here), discussing the shaming of those who violate social distancing guidelines during the coronavirus crisis, and on The Ethical War Blog (here), discussing employers' responses to public shaming. The former has since been expanded into a book chapter (here).
Going forward, Tom and I plan to obtain funding to run a project on the morality of online public shaming, which will bring together insights both from an in interdisciplinary group of scholars and non-academic stakeholders such as journalists, think tank researchers, and representatives from social media organisations, to make progress with understanding and tackling the major challenges presented by the phenomenon.