In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Justice requires that each person gets what he or she deserves. Luck is a matter of good or bad things simply befalling people; hence luck distributes to people things they do not deserve. Justice must then be in the business of morally correcting the impact of luck on individuals’ lives. This is an extremely simplified articulation of a popular–and in certain philosophical circles infamous–conception of justice called luck egalitarianism. As a kind of egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires something to be distributed equally, and various versions of the doctrine disagree about what this is. The luck in luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires that individuals not be advantaged (or disadvantaged) for features of their lives that have simply befallen them as a matter of good (or bad) luck; rather, social advantage (and disadvantage) should be tied to an individual’s choices. This basic principle of luck egalitarianism seems intuitive. The difficulty lies in building a conception of social justice upon it. Three pressing details confronting the luck egalitarian are the site, ground, and scope of egalitarian justice. These correspond, roughly to the following three questions: (1) to what do egalitarian principles of justice apply?; (2) Why does equality matter?; and (3) To whom are egalitarian duties of justice owed? In his new book, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kok-Chor Tan articulates and defends an original conception of luck egalitarianism according to which (1) egalitarian principles of justice apply to social institutions rather than to the whole of social life; (2) equality matters because there is a fundamental moral distinction between luck and choice; and (3) duties of justice are not bounded by state borders, but are owed globally. In developing his view, Tan responds to luck egalitarianism’s critics and launches compelling critiques of its competitors. The book hence provides the reader with both a detailed roadmap of the current debates over egalitarianism and a state-of-the-art formulation of a distinctive egalitarian conception of justice.

Ask any student or aficionado of the Vietnam War (1965-1972) for a top ten list of artifacts “unique” to the war, and chances are the phenomenon of “body counts” as a tool for measuring success in the field will come up. Indeed, the use of casualty metrics, while not the sole means of calculating progress in this unconventional war, was one of the Army’s most heralded – and subsequently, most criticized – assessment tools. Taking its place alongside more esoteric metrics, such as gauging security on the basis of population resettlement, calculating the denial of strategic space by measuring raw acreage of defoliated land, and estimating anticipated casualties on the basis of ordnance tonnage expended on a defined area, body counts became the most visibly broken method employed by the Pentagon during the war. Even now, nearly fifty years after the war began, historians continue to debate the effectiveness of such metrics, and how they did or did not accurately portray the course of the conflict. Gregory A. Daddis’ new book, No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2011), takes direct aim at the questions of how a technologically-advanced army measures its progress and success in an asymmetrical conflict. Recognizing that data collection efforts frequently overwhelmed any effort at proper and judicial analysis, Daddis considers how the quest for reliable metrics of success affected the conduct of operations in the field. No Sure Victory is a critical addition to the historiography of the Vietnam War, and presents a valuable addendum for students and practitioners of unconventional war alike.

Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, turn their backs to her. The girl is Abina, the men are “Important Men,” and together they grace the cover of of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collaborative effort of historian Trevor R. Getz and graphic artist Liz Clarke. In 1876 Abina took her former master to court in the British-controlled Gold Coast for having enslaved her. She had already escaped to freedom: she seems to have brought charges simply because she wanted her experience of slavery to be recognized. It wasn’t. Abina lost her case. But in reconstructing Abina’s story in graphic form, Getz and Clarke bring it to present-day readers. And they also bring important questions to the students who are the intended audience of this book: What background information do we need to understand Abina’s story? Whose voices do we hear, and whose don’t we hear? What do historians do when they don’t know all the details of a story? Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, and Liz Clarke is a professional artist and graphic designer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Together, they bring a silenced voice back to life, and they do it in an enormously engaging way.

From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable. At the same time, marriage is portrayed as necessary for a healthy and flourishing adult life. And we often see the event of a wedding to have a morally transforming power over the individuals who get married. But with only a little bit of reflection, our popular conception of the meaning and significance of marriage begins to look problematic. Is marriage really so different from other kinds of interpersonal relations that it should be accorded such a central place in our popular views about adulthood? Are those who happen to never fall in love and so never get married really doomed to an inferior or morally impoverished kind of life? And when one considers the significant social and legal benefits, rights, and privileges that accrue to individuals in virtue of their being married the standard picture seems all the more objectionable. These thoughts have led some to conclude that marriage should be disestablished as a civic status. In Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), Elizabeth Brake criticizes the popular view of marriage as intrinsically dyadic, heterosexual, and focused on romantic love and sexual exclusivity. She also rejects the idea that marriage is a unique kind of moral relation, one that differs in kind from friendships and other kinds of caring relationships. Brake also challenges the current political and legal significance that currently attaches to marriage. Yet she also rejects marriage disestablishment; employing arguments drawing from John Rawls’s later work, Brake opts instead for a conception of minimal marriage in which marriage is conceived as a relation between two or more people for purposes of mutual care.

Mark Twain called it “pious hypocrisies.” President McKinley called it “civilizing and Christianizing.” Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Susan K. Harris‘ latest book, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) targets the religious references in McKinley’s and Twain’s comments, assessing the role of religious rhetoric in the national and international debates over America’s global mission at the turn into the 20th century. She points out that no matter which side Americans took, all assumed that the U.S. was founded in Protestant Christian principles. Harris probes the ramifications of this assumption, drawing on documents ranging from Noah Webster’s 1832 History of the United States through Congressional speeches and newspaper articles, to In His Steps, the 1896 novel that asked “What Would Jesus Do?” Throughout, she offers a provocative reading both of the debates’ religious framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity within the U.S. She also moves outside U.S. geopolitical boundaries, reviewing responses to the Americans’ venture into global imperialism among Europeans, Latin Americans, and Filipinos. Harris works through key voices, including Twain, U.S. Senators Albert Beveridge and Benjamin Tillman; Filipino nationalists Emilio Aguinaldo and Apolinario Mabini; Latin American nationalists José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, and Rubén Darío; and the voices of Americans who wrote poems, essays, and letters either endorsing or protesting America’s plunge into colonialism. This book matters: in the process of uncovering the past, Harris shows us the roots of current debates over textbooks, Christian nationalism, and U.S. global imaging.

Kevin Whitehead‘s highly readable, informative and entertaining Why Jazz? A Concise Guide (Oxford University Press, 2011) is bookshelf “must have” for anyone who loves jazz – and he does it in a question/answer call and response style that is the perfect format for today’s point and click text and twitter world. It’s a primer for those who want to know more about the fascinating personalities in jazz from Louis Armstrong to Mary Lou Williams to Anthony Braxton (and Miles, Mingus, Monk and Coltrane); it’s a history lesson from New Orleans Dixieland to otherworldly free-jazz. Best of all, Kevin gives the reader a rich trove of musical examples and a wide-ranging discography certain to open new vistas for those who are just digging jazz for the first time as well as aficionados who have been listening for years. Almost a half century ago, historian Will Durant condensed his 11 volumes of a lifetime of research into a small, thin work acknowledging the folly of trying to encompass the complexity of the impossible task before him. Kevin Whitehead has worked a similar miracle in his slim volume Why Jazz? This is a gem of a book that’s got passion and insight and beckons those who dig jazz and don’t know why as well as those who think they “get it” and want to know more.

Chris Mole‘s book, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2011) provides a wonderfully elegant answer to a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to pay attention? What is “attention,” and why does it matter to science studies? In addition to offering a beautifully worked-out answer to the question of attention, Mole offers a way to think about how philosophy and science can fruitfully speak to each other in ways that can benefit both fields. Our conversation about the book ranged from considering the non-spooky nature of metaphysics, to the distinction between events and objects, to Mole’s musical metaphor for thinking about cognitive processes. Enjoy!

Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. From 1791 he maintained daily diaries, and it is these that Peter Robb has so magnificently re-worked as Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822 (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2 vols). Richard’s diaries are quite literally a chronicle of the everyday and the ordinary, what might even be called mundane and the petty, in Calcutta in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these diaries Richard talks about his children, his loves, his network of colleagues, helps, acquaintances, what might today be dubbed ‘frenemies’, people, European, Indian, ‘half-caste,’ who exasperated him but without whom it was well nigh impossible to function in a city where everyone needed everyone else to get their work done. Peter Robb’s edited compendium of these diaries is a record of how social networks operated in a very cosmopolitan city, yet one whose inhabitants were always all too aware of their social, religious, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Sometimes the lines between the personal and the professional blurred, and sometimes favors were given and taken from unlikely persons, and people were not always, by modern standards, ethical, yet in the end everyone managed to establish for themselves a position that would guarantee, if not prosperity, survival.

It’s a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldn’t be able to do these interviews. In particular, I don’t speak Swedish, and I’m not going to try to speak Latin to a world expert on the subject. Fortunately for my purposes, English has reached a level of saturation, and thus Tore Janson is able to explain to us why that is. The History of Languages: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) gives a brief synopsis of some of the major trends in language change over the course of recorded history. Indo-European is discussed, but the scope of the book is much wider, turning to the Bantu and Australian language families, and also to the written traditions of China and Ancient Egypt. Rather than being concerned with the linguistic regularities of change, Prof. Janson’s focus is much more on the circumstantial historical causes of change, and his work is a useful complement to work in historical linguistics – in addition to being a very enjoyable read in its own right. In this interview, we talk about some of the points he raises: the dissimilarity between the languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, the motivations for the emergence of written language and its role as a stabilising influence on society, and the foundations of linguistic identity in the modern nation-state, among others. And we consider the parallel between Latin in England and Arabic in Persia, as examples of how seemingly inevitable linguistic change can unexpectedly falter.

This week we have Geoff Dean on the show to talk about his new book Organised Crime: Policing Illegal Business Entrepreneurialism (Oxford University Press, 2010). This is a practical book about organized crime. Geoff and his co-authors, Ivar Fahsing and Petter Gottschalk, approach organized crime from a business perspective and try to provide a means of investigating this type of crime from a market point of view. They see an organized crime enterprise like any other business enterprise, and say that it must go through the same stages or growth that are experienced by a legal commercial business. The authors are experienced researchers in the methodologies of policing and want to recognize the entrepreneurial basis of criminal enterprises, and investigative methods that pay heed to these characteristics of large criminal organizations. This is not a book about any one criminal group. Many examples and case studies are provided but they intend the book to have universal appeal. One of the books advantages is Geoff’s ability to communicate visually. He is the master of the chart and diagram. As you will hear in the interview, the book is filled with visual explanations of the ideas and concepts it addresses. While Organised Crime was not written as a textbook, I have used it in class and found that it provides a good explanation of organized crime (for advanced students) as well as a great mechanism of strategic analysis which we use as an assessment tool.