The Gerald Gaus Memorial PPE Essay Prize

Jerry Gaus devoted much of his career to fostering the talents of his students. He encouraged innovation and the pursuit of projects that matter to the individual scholar rather than merely following current trends, and he was excited to help students develop their ideas. On our memorial page, you’ll find an astute remembrance of Jerry Gaus and his work by Jacob Barrett, Adam Gjesdal, Bill Glod, Keith Hankins, Brian Kogelmann, Ryan Muldoon, John Thrasher, Kevin Vallier, and Chad Van Schoelandt.

In honor of Jerry, we have created the Gerald Gaus Memorial PPE Essay Prize. This prize, available to currently enrolled graduate students, will be awarded to the essay that best exemplifies this spirit of innovation in PPE.  The winner will receive a financial award and the opportunity to present the essay at an afternoon session at the Annual PPE Society Conference. The session will focus on the themes of the paper, paired with two more senior scholars.

We sincerely thank you for your contributions.

2024 Winner: “The Normative Implications of Complexity: Selection and Function in the Design of Pluralistic Political Systems,” Victor Wu

Victor C. Wu is a PhD student in political science at Yale University. Substantively, his main research interests are in democratic theory, organizational theory, and philosophy of social science. Methodologically, his main interest is in “political theory as political science.” Previously, he was a Yenching Scholar at Peking University and an artillery officer in the United States Marine Corps.

Abstract: This paper makes three interrelated interventions within contemporary political theory. First it argues that many theorists, in particular those debating the relative merits of election versus sortition (or electoral democracy versus lottocracy), neglect the extensive institutional pluralism and corresponding selection-mechanism pluralism of democratic political practice. Second and most importantly, it argues their approaches to normative theorizing and institutional design are methodologically flawed. This is because pluralistic political systems are complex systems in which political ideals are often achieved primarily as system-level emergent properties, rather than as direct properties of their elements. Normative theories which fail to explain how their favored political ideals will be realized and sustained through the interactions between heterogeneous offices and institutions are thus inadequate. Third, the paper develops the foundations for a functionalist approach to institutional design more appropriate for pluralistic political systems. The key concepts are the normative function of the office within the larger political system and the selection mechanism chosen—including election, sortition, and relatively undertheorized options such as appointment and self-selection—along with two design principles: incentive alignment and personality alignment between officeholders and offices. Using this framework, the paper revisits two familiar topics: political partisanship and judicial selection.

2023 Winner: “Individuals, Norms, and the Basic Structure,” Shiying Li

Shiying (pronounced Shih-ying) Li is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She mainly works in social and political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of education. Topics she has written on include social stigmas, distributive justice, the ethics of personal relationships and violent revolutions, social norms and self-respect. 

Abstract:
Critics of liberals such as Sally Haslanger (2017) and G. A. Cohen (1997; 2008) have charged mainstream liberal theories including John Rawls’s theory of justice as not able to account for the importance of cultures and ideologies due to their statist orientation. Rawls famously argued that principles of justice apply only to the basic structure, which many have interpreted as being constituted by formal institutions –  the political constitution and the major economic and social institutions. However, Haslanger’s concept of social meanings is not clearly defined. Cohen’s overly broad and individualistic understanding of ethos makes it difficult to consider the ethos as a part of the basic structure. We run into the trouble of including all individual sentiments and attitudes into the basic structure. Instead, I would like to shift our attention to the concept of social norms. The account of social norms I adopt, largely in line with the one developed by Cristina Bicchieri (2005), has operational definitions and testable consequences. Thus, the model is explanatorily and predictively powerful. It is also widely used by social scientists and extensive empirical research on the origin, evolution, and impact of social norms and mechanisms of norm-following have been produced. Using results from empirical research, I argue that at least some social norms meet the Rawlsian criteria of the basic structure because they significantly affect the distribution of fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. Paradigmatic examples include those sustaining phenomena such as market-maximizing, gendered division of labor, and social stigmas. Like formal institutions, they exert coercive force on individuals, to a greater or lesser extent depending on situations and other factors, through various mechanisms. Social norms also meet the conditions of stability and publicity which are important considerations in Rawlsian theories of justice. Moreover, they fit especially well with an alternative characterization of the basic structure by A. J. Julius, as globally consequential, collectively alterable, individually unchosen, systematically action-shaping and goods-distributing. We not only underappreciate how some social norms have the same essential characteristics as formal institutions do. But we also have other moral and political reasons to subject them to the purview of justice, including our needs for a comprehensive approach to normatively evaluate social norms, and theoretical tools to develop theories of legitimate political interventions on norms.

In addition, I aim to shed light on another difficult question that has haunted many liberals especially those endorsing a more expanded understanding of the basic structure – what the content and the extent of individual duties of justice are. I do not attempt to provide a complete answer to this question, but I hope to advance our understanding by making some substantial suggestions. Even if my arguments fail to persuade my opponents, I hope that my discussion can at least highlight the moral and political significance of social norms, clarify the conceptual space on the issue of what demands justice makes on individuals, and lend support to a more expansive view on the issue. While I pursue these aims, I respond to proponents of a statist understanding of the basic structure such as Gina Schouten, A. J. Julius, and Samual Scheffler.

2022 Winner: “On the Possibility of Right Answers in Politics,” Matthew Draper

Matthew Draper is a political theorist and PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on democratic theory, authoritarian theory, and political epistemology. Matthew received his BA in economics and government from William and Mary, and his JD from William and Mary law school. He is currently editorial assistant at The Adam Smith Review.

Abstract:
There is a tension in democratic politics between popular rule and expertise. We want the people to rule, but we also in some sense want the “best” or the “right” decisions to be made. This article will suggest that the scope for legitimate democratic delegation to experts varies with the political unit’s degree of consensus on paradigms and objectives. To deepen this conjecture, I develop a crude taxonomy of the varieties of political choices that legislatures are called upon to make. Although many scholars have sought to develop a taxonomy of the varieties of expertise (e.g. Turner 2001), fewer authors have considered the background level of political consensus as a mediating factor in determinations of the legitimacy of expert delegation. I argue that there exist at least three distinct cases or situations of agreement or disagreement that characterize political units, and that the role of experts will differ according to the degree of contestation that attends each type. Further, I suggest that the legitimate role of experts in a given society will depend on that society’s degree of cohesion regarding the objectives to be sought through politics and the paradigms through which these objectives are to be pursued, and that conditions of ideological diversity or polarization will restrict the range of political questions that can be legitimately delegated to experts. This is to suggest that political pluralism, though desirable for many reasons, imposes an efficiency cost on democratic politics. In cases of deep epistemological disagreement, these costs will be high, and the scope of legitimate delegation to experts will be low.

2021 Winner: “Is Justice a Fixed Point?” Alexander Schaefer

Alexander Schaefer recently received his PhD in philosophy from The University of Arizona where he was a Politics, Philosophy, Economics and Law Fellow at the Freedom Center. In Fall 2021, he will join New York University’s Classical Liberal Institute as a postdoctoral fellow. His research focuses on social complexity and social contract theory.

Abstract:

Following the work of John Rawls, political theorists have fixated on the comparative stability of different equilibrium states of justice. This article identifies a crucial gap in this literature, namely, the lack of attention paid to non-equilibrating systems. Drawing on Kakutani’s Theorem, I present plausible cases in which society will fail to exhibit any equilibrium states of justice. An important implication for political theory is that, rather than focusing exclusively on stable equilibria, theorists should examine dynamic processes of justice which need not exhibit equilibrating forces. To this end, a more useful concept than stability is that of robustness, or the ability of a system to maintain general desiderata in the face of an evolving conception of justice.