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You are invited to join us for our second annual Berggruen Fellows workshop entitled Conceptualizing Justice in Comparative Perspective on Friday, February 2nd, in Wasserstein Hall, room WCC 1010, 1585 Massachusetts Ave. This year's fellows have invited leading scholars in their fields to join them in challenging dominant notions of justice across cultures, time and place. We are looking forward to a day that promises to be thought-provoking and unsettling, and hope to see you there.
Program
9 – 9:30am Breakfast & Opening Remarks, Mathias Risse
9:30 – 12:00pm Session 1: Historical Perspectives, chaired by Jennifer London
Theorizing Justice Across Premodern Near Eastern Contexts
This roundtable will offer a first attempt to bridge premodern work in the humanities with contemporary discussions on justice in political theory and ethics. It will bring together a few humanists working on diverse premodern traditions in Near Eastern contexts, who can introduce scholars in completely disparate fields to how they would even begin to fathom what “justice” means in the sources they study, what the words were to express it, and what it signified for theoretical discussions of political thought and rule, and even, if possible, for wider popular discussions on politics and ethics. Since it would be impossible to survey the scope of the whole premodern world across time and space, we will begin this conversation by asking just a few premodern scholars of Persian, Central Asian and other early Islamic contexts to offer brief introductions to this subject and how they would go about thinking about the concept of justice. I ask them to submit a summary of the sources they will tackle, the images they will include and the names and definitions of the concepts of justice they encounter and central questions that allow them to engage comparatively, across different sorts of texts, with notions or models of justice. The works of these few scholars are not intended to be representative of how to explore justice in the geographic context they study, but first steps toward a more global discussion on how to brainstorm on a given concept across space. I will then speak for about twenty minutes reflecting on the implications of this exercise for scholarship in political theory and the history of political thought in political science. Mathias Risse will reflect upon the implications of this exploration for contemporary scholarship in philosophy and ethics for about twenty minutes.
Panelists:
- Jennifer London, Berggruen Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University
- Linda Darling, Professor of History, University of Arizona
- Ahmed El Shamsy, Associate Professor, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago; Visiting Fellow, Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School
- Parvaneh Pourshariati, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Social Sciences at New York City College of Technology (CUNY)
- Mathias Risse, Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
12:00 – 1:00pm Lunch, on site
1:00 – 3:00pm Session 2: Contemporary Perspectives, chaired by Andrew March
Justice and the Problem of Deep Moral Pluralism: Islamic Challenges
It is widely held that the foundation of most modern and post-modern political ethics is some acknowledgement of the reasonableness of moral pluralism. Whether conceived in stylized Kantian terms as the “priority of the right over the good” or in utilitarian terms as the subjectivity of preferences, the dominant theories underpinning liberal ethics seek to ground accounts of obligation or human thriving without assuming a single conception of the good. Of course, there are many ethical projects in post-Enlightenment modernity that do not yield to these constraints, from those informed by Marxism to recent revivals of natural law. But theories that place at the center of their mission the protection of individual and group rights, religious and cultural freedom, and trust in persons’ capacities to authenticate their own conception of the good, are characteristic of modernity.
This session approaches the problem of reasonable pluralism through a very specific question posed to Islamic moral psychology and theology. Given that the foundation of Islamic ethics and moral agency is the rational verifiability of the existence of God, what kind of reasonableness of the most radical kind of moral pluralism that exists in modern, complex societies can be recognized? Can the acceptance of moral and doctrinal pluralism in a theistic tradition like Islam extend all the way to recognizing that rejection of theism itself might be driven by something other than ignorance, divine spite or willful neglect of manifest signs? In other words, is this kind of radical moral pluralism something that the theist might be able to see as something other than tragic or temporary in the social world?
Panelists:
- Andrew March, Berggruen Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University
- Ovamir Anjum, Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo
- Thomas Scanlon, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity (Emeritus), Harvard University
3 – 3:15pm Coffee & Tea Break
3:15 – 5:15pm Session 3: Forward-looking Perspectives, chaired by Liz Fouksman
Provocations towards Utopia: Future Visions of Work, Time Freedom and Redistributive Justice
"Exploring real utopias implies developing a sociology of the possible, not just the actual" (Erik Olin Wright)
Too often we focus so deeply on where we are now, and how we can move away from that spot, that we forget to ask where we are going. This session is meant to be provocation for us to think about, propose, and debate just that: utopian visions of where we want to end up, and what a just society looks like in Utopia. In particular, this session asks us to envision and consider radical proposals around reaching a just(er) society through the decommodification of labor, around universal forms of redistribution, and around time freedom. All three encourage us to radically reimagine a new theory, politics and sociology of a world where wage labor is decentered from being our key distributive, disciplining and meaning-making mechanism. How do we envision just distribution of resources and deservingness outside of wages? How can we understand just deserts beyond hard work? How can we justly provide people with opportunities to hold power, create meaning and forge networks of mutuality and social cooperation outside of the work place? And why should we even want to? We will begin with a few short provocations from scholars across the disciplines, and then open up the conversation and debate around these and other utopian visions of a just world beyond the horizon of wages, labor and hard work.
Panelists:
- Liz Fouksman, Berggruen Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University
- Julie Rose, Assistant Professor of Government, Dartmouth College; Fellow-in-Residence, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University
- James Livingston, Professor of History, Rutgers University
- Almaz Zelleke, Associate Professor of Practice in Political Science, NYU Shanghai
5:15pm Closing Remarks, Danielle Allen and Mathias Risse