Author Meets Critics: Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World challenges the conventional approach to problems of injustice in global normative theory. It offers a radical alternative designed to transform our thinking about what kind of problem injustice is and to show how political theorists might do better in understanding and addressing it. Michael Goodhart argues that the dominant paradigm, ideal moral theory (IMT), takes a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to injustice. At the same time, leading alternatives to IMT struggle to make sense of the role values play in politics and abandon political theory's critical and prescriptive aspirations. Goodhart treats justice claims as ideological and develops an innovative bifocal theoretical framework for making sense of them. This framework reconciles realistic political analysis with substantive normative commitments, enabling theorists to come to grips with injustice as a political rather than a philosophical problem. The book describes the work that political theory and political theorists can do to combat injustice and illustrates its key arguments through a novel reconceptualization of responsibility for injustice.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Brooke A. Ackerly Vanderbilt University

Presenters

• Ines Valdez Ohio State University

• Jennifer C. Rubenstein University of Virginia

• John S. Dryzek University of Canberra

• Margaret Kohn University of Toronto

• Michael Goodhart University of Pittsburgh