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HomeHomeBrad Taylor (ANU): Eliminating ‘Feasibility’
Brad Taylor (ANU): Eliminating ‘Feasibility’

Recent work in political philosophy has argued that feasibility is an important and underappreciated constraint on normative political theory. Seeing 'feasibility' as an imprecise concept, one strand of this literature has used conceptual analysis to interrogate the concept and formulate general standards of feasibility. Although we agree that there needs to be further conceptual analysis, this paper (co-authored with Will Bosworth) argues that feasibility analysis involves a number of related but distinct standards not easily reducible to a single metric. Rather than asking what counts as an appropriate standard of feasibility, we look at how and why feasibility claims are made in political argument and suggest that this usage is so diverse that no general standard is likely to apply to all. We argue that the search for general standards of feasibility is likely to produce unproductive verbal disputes and to confuse questions of feasibility and desirability. We then suggest a method we think capable of overcoming these problems by focusing on the arguments in which the term is used, rather than the concept to which the term refers.​

Date & time

  • Mon 22 Sep 2014, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location

Coombs Seminar Room D

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MSPT seminars