Browsing by Author "D'Amato, Claudio"
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- Human Capabilities and Collectivist JusticeD'Amato, Claudio (Virginia Tech, 2017-06-05)The capability approach to justice, made popular by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has been a stalwart of the human development literature for the last 30 years, and its core ideals underwrite the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. This dissertation offers a new version of the approach, rejecting many of its ideological commitments to liberal-democratic humanism and replacing them with more distinctly collectivist and communitarian ones. It contends that the capability approach, when used as a theoretical framework for global development, need not contain almost any ethical normativity with regard to a definition of justice, and indeed it is much more functional when it endorses a moderate ethical relativism. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, it shows that all existing versions of the capability approach are ideologically committed to a specific kind of liberal humanism, which its proponents consider universalist but that is actually quite provincial. Second, it argues that collectivist critiques from prominent capability theorists in the last decade have been misunderstood and their recommendations unheeded, a fact that this dissertation attempts to rectify. Third, it offers a properly collectivist account of group capabilities and group self-determination, which can do all the normative work that individual capabilities and agency perform in the approach's original versions. Finally, it introduces the notion of public objective capabilities, which justifies a higher deference to collective self-determination at the expense of some individual freedom and equitable participation in democratic polity. The overall goal of this new collectivist version of the approach is not to reject the worth of capability as a metric of global justice, but rather to reinforce it. A collectivist capabilitarianism shows that capability is so well suited to global development work that it can function across diverse political realities, without the ideological constraints of a liberal humanism that is widely accepted in the Global North but whose cross-cultural appeal has been far overstated by its proponents.
- Human Capabilities and the Racial ContractD'Amato, Claudio (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2014-04-01)Global relations are largely shaped by what Charles Mills calls “the racial contract”: the sometimes explicit and sometimes unspoken agreement that social arrangements must favor whites over nonwhites. This bias is strong among white political philosophers and especially in the liberal contractarian theories of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, and, most recently, Rawls. While these theories pay lip service to nominal equality in the name of universalism, they also ignore the inequality and disadvantage that nonwhites suffer at the hands of whites, and thus they contribute to epistemic obscurantism and racial domination. In this paper, first, I strengthen Mills‘s argument by providing an even more convincing objection against the procedural requirements of John Rawls‘s theory of justice; second, I argue that this objection gives us a good reason to distinguish between Rawls‘s liberal contractarianism and other theories in white political philosophy that are far more sensitive to Mills‘s critique; and, finally, I offer a partial defense of Martha Nussbaum‘s and Amartya Sen‘s capability–based approach, which I think is uniquely situated to address the inequalities of the racial contract.
- A Non-Liberal Account of DevelopmentD'Amato, Claudio (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-12-03)For much the 20th century, development aid to the deeply impoverished nations of the Global South has taken the form of humanitarian assistance. Development projects have been motivated, first, by a humanist principle that all people everywhere deserve basic human rights and freedom from want; and, second, by the widely accepted belief that the Global South is entitled to receive extensive reparations for centuries of colonial exploitation. Together, these two views have made development work the near-exclusive province of liberal humanists, and thus most development projects are designed to advance ideological positions that are popular in Western democracies: individual liberty, equal social standing, fair opportunity, and fair political representation. But while the liberal-humanist ideology is valid on its own merits, it is neither the only nor the best available normative framework to underwrite development efforts. This paper argues that development workers—especially international NGOs and transnational activists—should design projects that incorporate a communitarian, morally particularistic, and non-liberal (but not illiberal) ethic that respects the collective determination of groups without requiring the affirmation of individual free agency. This proposal follows some recent collectivist shifts in the literature on Amartya Sen’s capability approach to justice, which is explicitly or implicitly adopted by many development projects based in the Global South. An increasing number of critics in the last decade have argued that the approach’s liberal-humanist foundations hinder rather than promote its usefulness in eradicating systemic poverty while respecting local communal values. This paper sides with these critiques and takes them a step further, suggesting that development workers who subscribe to the capability approach should commit more fully to a communitarian ethic founded on moral particularism.
- Rawls and capabilities: the current debate [draft]D'Amato, Claudio (Virginia Tech, 2014)The capability approach to justice was con-ceived as an alternative to the Rawlsian scholar-ship that became dominant in moral and political philosophy at the end of the XX century. Among other issues, capability theorists have objected to Rawls’s identification of the currency of distribu-tive justice with primary goods and to the claim that the appropriate subject of distributive justice is the basic structure of society. As Ingrid Robeyns (2011) puts it, capability theorists argue that capability as a “metric of justice” does a better job than Rawlsian primary goods at capturing what human beings seek in a social distributive scheme. How-ever, the relation between the two sides of the debate is not one of stark opposition, but rather one of productive exchange: all work within the liberal political tradition, and in the last few years there has been considerable mutual understanding, co-operation, and a certain softening of the two sides’ original positions—pun intended. This paper surveys the main arguments in the debate and evaluates recent (2003-2013) contributions to the literature that attempt to bridge the gap between justice as fairness and the capability approach.
- The road to moral independence: agency, gender, and family in The Last of Us [draft]D'Amato, Claudio (Virginia Tech, 2014)... The Last of Us (TLOU) is one of the most literary games of the modern era, and my personal favorite in a long time, perhaps since the equally well-written Mass Effect 2. It is ripe with moral dilemmas and psychologically fascinating characters, and it allows players and critics to discuss gender roles at a con-ceptual depth seldom seen in the video game industry. Much has been said in the popular press about whether the game is fundamentally sexist with some redeeming qualities or fundamentally feminist with some dark spots. It is in fact both. From a purely critical standpoint, it is a sharp, at times virulent, critique of patriarchal gender roles. But its critique is too understated, and most players will be unable to see it and will risk mistaking villains for heroes and sexism for equality. TLOU is the best possible game that could have been written given its constraints, but it could have made its feminist point—which it does have, and which is extremely good—much better.
- A "Veritable Jekyll and Hyde" - Epistemic Circularity and Reliabilist Theories of JustificationD'Amato, Claudio (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-27)In philosophical theories of knowledge (epistemology), justification is a desirable property that one's beliefs ought to have before they can be accepted as part of a rational discourse. Roughly, for internalists about justification, a belief is justified if the subject has or has available to him good reasons to believe it; while for externalists a belief is justified if there exist good reasons to believe it, regardless of whether the subject actually has or has access to those reasons. One such externalist view of justification is reliabilism, the position that a belief is justified if it has been produced by a properly functioning belief-forming mechanism (BFM). Some examples of BFMs available to human beings are sense perception, memory, and deduction. Epistemic circularity is a notorious problem for reliabilism. If a belief is only justified if it was produced reliably by a certain BFM, how can I ever know for sure that a certain BFM is itself reliable? For instance, take the meta-belief that "sense perception is a reliable BFM." This belief is produced, at least in part, through sense perception itself, for example by analyzing the track record of my past sense perceptions and finding it to be in good order. But if a BFM is thus allowed to vouch for its own trustworthiness, then we have no way to discriminate between reliable and unreliable BFMs. After all, when trying to ascertain if a suspect in a murder case is sincere, it is quite irresponsible to ask the suspect himself. Thus, internalist critics complain, reliabilism is plagued by epistemic circularity and loses sight of the normative goal of epistemology. Reliabilist responses to this serious charge have been of two kinds: (1) to show that epistemically circular arguments can be justificatory, and thus that BFMs can vouch for their own re-liability; or (2) to concede that epistemically circular arguments cannot be justificatory, but then to also insist that some higher-level circularity must be allowed in one's justificatory practices, or no beliefs at all can ever be justified. Here I argue that the first strategy fails and the second succeeds. Internalists are correct that epistemically circular arguments cannot be justificatory in the way that some reliabilists expect them to be, but they are incorrect that all circularity must be banished before our justificatory practices can be virtuous. To always allow circularity makes knowledge reprehensibly easy, but to never let it in at all is a kind of epistemic suicide.