How should we think about the Relation between Principles and Agency?

Ethics and Global Politics 6 (2):75-83 (2013)
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Abstract

In this article, I will reflect on Lea Ypi’s methodological contribution in her wonderful book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency. Ypi addresses the important and underexplored issue of the relation between normative principles and political agency. She proposes a ‘dialectical approach’ to normative political theory, which she contrasts with ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ approaches, arguing that the first does a better job in articulating progressive guidelines for political agents seeking to achieve justice. Ypi presents a general framework that applies, but is not restricted to, global justice. In what follows, I first reconstruct what I take to be Ypi’s key conceptual and substantive moves and then raise some critical observations and questions. The central polemical contentions are that Ypi’s arguments do not succeed at defeating the importance of ideal theory for activist political theory and practice, and that we need an account of normative political reasoning that articulates more explicitly the relation between considerations of moral desirability and political feasibility

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Pablo Gilabert
Concordia University

Citations of this work

In defence of progressive political change: against conservative progress and other normative troubles.Ilaria Cozzaglio - 2024 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 27 (7):1131-1154.

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