The Australian National University

Post-Doc, Philosophy

Research Fellow

College of Arts and Social Sciences

Thesis Title: Feasibility Constraints for Political Theory

About

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at ANU, working on the ARC project "Benefiting From Injustice" with Christian Barry and Robert Goodin.

I am interested in ideal and non-ideal theory, ought implies can, political possibility, feasibility constraints, collective action problems and coordination problems, political decision-making and practical reasoning, state agency, climate change, and in general questions about human psychological and cultural malleability, and how it affects the chances of political reform.

I wrote my PhD thesis on an analysis of feasibility for use in Political Theory. Feasibility is something that people talk about a lot (or at least, they talk about theories being 'ideal' or 'utopian' or 'unrealistic' or 'infeasible', vs. their being 'non-ideal', 'realistic', 'feasible') but no one really clarifies what they mean, and I think this causes some talking past one another. So in the first part of my thesis I do some conceptual analysis on feasibility, and try to say what kinds of facts we need to appeal to in order to establish that a proposal for reform is feasible, or isn't. In the second part I try to apply that discussion, and I talk about individual motivations in addressing global poverty, and also the chances of successful international cooperation between states.


Here are the papers I have so far, most of which you can find at http://philpapers.org/s/Holly%20Lawford-Smith:

Lawford-Smith, Holly. "The Motivation Question: Arguments from Justice, and from Humanity", British Journal of Political Science, (forthcoming).

Lawford-Smith, Holly. "The Feasibility of Collectives' Actions", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, (forthcoming).

Gilabert, Pablo. & Lawford-Smith, Holly. "Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration", Political Studies, (forthcoming).

Lawford-Smith, Holly. 'Ideal Theory: A Reply to Valentini.' Journal of Political Philosophy (Vol. 18, No. 3, 2010, pp. 357-368).

Lawford-Smith, Holly. 'The Importance of Being Earnest, and the Difficulty of Faking It.'  Norms and Values, ed. Michael Baurmann, Geoffrey Brennan, Robert E. Goodin & Nicholas Southwood. Baden-Baden:  Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2010.

Lawford-Smith, Holly. 'Cosmopolitan Global Justice: Brock v. The Feasibility Sceptic', Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, forthcoming

Lawford-Smith, Holly. 'Review of Larry Alexander's Crime and Culpability', Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy (Vol. 35, 2010, pp. 152-158).

Lawford-Smith, Holly. 'Feasibility Constraints and the Cosmopolitan Vision.' Questioning Cosmopolitanism, ed. Stan van Hooft and Wim Vandekerhove.  Dordrecht:  Springer, 2010.