The Feasibility Issue

Brennan, H Geoffrey; Pettit, Philip

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199234769.003.0010

Cited by 26 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…The concept of standing regards the ability of states of affairs to command social respect. The feasibility of SG can be increased by ideals that are rewarding in terms of social esteem; indeed, reciprocated social esteem is a very powerful incentive for compliance (Brennan and Pettit, ). The ideals of legitimacy and procedural justice, as other authoritative studies explicitly or implicitly underline, seem to be the most appropriate foundations for morally sounder SG and therefore for lending it greater feasibility.…”

Section: Reducing Sg Frictions With Soft Constraints and Policy Recommentioning

confidence: 99%

Sulfur in the Sky with Diamonds: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Solar Geoengineering

Grasso

2019

Global Policy

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Solar geoengineering (SG) is considered a promising, albeit controversial, climate engineering technology to help reduce predicted global warming. However, the complexity of SG raises serious doubts about its political practicability. The objective of this article is to investigate this technology's feasibility, a fundamental dimension of said practicability. Feasibility is here understood as a political property: the higher the feasibility of a state of affairs ranks, the greater its eventual political practicability. According to this perspective, the less SG clashes with economic, institutional, and moral soft constraints, the more feasible it becomes, and hence the greater its political practicability. An analysis of economic and institutional soft constraints points to a high degree of SG feasibility. This feasibility is, however, limited by the perceived non‐bearable moral costs which SG involves. Given the greater weight of moral soft constraints, SG's overall feasibility is therefore low. Based on these indications, the article offers suggestions for lessening SG's friction with soft constraints, especially with the highly sensitive moral ones, with the aim of increasing this technology's feasibility. On the basis of this heightened feasibility, the paper concludes with policy recommendations which improves the practicability of SG.

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Section: Reducing Sg Frictions With Soft Constraints and Policy Recommentioning

confidence: 99%

Sulfur in the Sky with Diamonds: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Solar Geoengineering

Grasso

2019

Global Policy

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“…Since feasibility is a workhorse concept here, its definition is crucial but beyond the scope of this paper. The relevant literature on feasibility includes the following: Brennan and Pettit 2005;Cowen 2007;and Raikka 1998. 33 The above ranking is according to life expectancy at birth, 2010 estimates.…”

Section: The Failure Analysis Approach To Institutional Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prescribing Institutions Without Ideal Theory

Wiens¹

2017

Preprint

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I. PRELIMINARIES Political philosophers are not shy to prescribe ways to design social and political institutions so as to eradicate or at least mitigate various actual injustices. The conventional wisdom is that such prescriptions are the province of nonideal theory but that ideal theory is required as a guide for nonideal theory. On this view, our first task is to specify fully just principles of regulation-that is, principles that regulate the constitution of fully just institutional arrangements. 1 These principles subsequently guide and constrain our attempts to prescribe institutional solutions to address actual injustices. 2 Call this the ideal guidance approach to institutional design. This view is 2 mistaken, or so I will argue. Ideal theory does not yield 'guiding principles' that actual institutions must aim to realize, even if only approximately. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is also avoidable.Recent debate on the relationship of ideal theory to nonideal theory suffers from a dearth of clear alternatives to the ideal guidance approach. On the one hand, those who reject the notion that ideal theory is required as a guide for nonideal theory wind up rejecting ideal theory altogether as 'normatively useless' without offering any alternative method for prescribing institutional reforms. 3 On the other hand, those who defend ideal theory against this charge wind up defending the notion that ideal theory properly understood is still useful as a guide for nonideal theory despite the limitations noted by critics, in part because there appears to be no other way to go about prescribing morally progressive institutional reforms. 4 To overcome this stalemate, we should pay less attention to characterizing the ideal/nonideal distinction and focus squarely on the following methodological question:How should we approach the task of prescribing feasible institutional solutions to address actual injustice? The issue here is identifying the relevant inputs as well as the appropriate procedure for turning those inputs into institutional design prescriptions.Although this issue is clearly related to debate concerning the ideal/nonideal theory dis--tinction, I don't want to engage that debate directly. This is because 'nonideal theory' is ambiguous between three different conceptions of the task of nonideal theory: (1) theorizing that identifies intermediate institutional reforms to help us transition from actual institutional arrangements to fully just institutional arrangements; (2) theorizing that identifies institutional arrangements that we should aspire to implement under actual conditions; and (3) theorizing that prescribes feasible institutional solutions to actual injustice. 5 Given the multifarious philosophical controversies surrounding that will refer to theorizing that prescribes feasible institutional solutions to actual injustice as clinical institutional theory, or clinical theory for short. To reiterate, the central issue here is how, methodologically speaking, we should approach the task of clin...

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“…In their paper on "The Feasibility Issue" (2005) they warn us about the "ideal-theory abstraction". The danger of such an abstraction is that "it will lead philosophers to go for a soft, visionary focus in their normative thinking and to argue for an idealized system" that is "nowhere to be found and that might be counter-productive to try to establish" [17]. Here is an example of the ideal-theory abstraction.…”

Section: On the Relevance Of Principle-based Conceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Margalit's criticism against "thinkers" in "the domain of education" [29] is an argument of the above type, and so is Brennan and Pettit's argument against political philosophers who engage in the "ideal-theory abstraction" [30]. But whatever we might think about, say, "ideal-theorists" views about the second-best options, perhaps we should not assume that they usually think in the way they do because of some principle-based conception they have applied.…”

Section: On the Relevance Of Principle-based Conceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Find the Second-Best Option?

Räikkä

2014

Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics

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The Feasibility Issue

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

Sulfur in the Sky with Diamonds: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Solar Geoengineering

Sulfur in the Sky with Diamonds: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Solar Geoengineering

Prescribing Institutions Without Ideal Theory

How to Find the Second-Best Option?

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