Principal speaker
Dr Shmuel Nili
What should be the response to the domestic and international aspects of pervasive corruption, when disrupting such corruption might pose serious threats to political and economic stability? What should be the response to other abuses of public office - and other abuses of public coffers - in the face of such threats? These questions may arise when senior politicians face direct charges of personal corruption (think of South Korea's impeached President Park Geun-hye), or when they spread a culture of cronyism around them (think of Pakistan's former President Asif Ali Zardari, widely known as “Mister ten percent”). But these questions also arise when reflecting on broader systematic issues, such as international problems of odious debt, where the stability of the international financial system often seems to require government acknowledgement of debt accumulated even by repellent past rulers, from Cambodia's Lon Nal to Marcos in the Philippines. Such moral dilemmas are ultimately global in their reach.
The people's duty works to address these dilemmas by developing two new normative frameworks associated with the people, as the collective agent in whose name modern political power is exercised. I contend, first, that there is distinctive normative value to thinking about the people in a liberal democracy as an agent with integrity that can be threatened, paralleling the integrity of an individual person. Second, I construct an account of the people's property which significantly improves on existing accounts of public ownership. After showing the intimate connections between these integrity and property frameworks and the legal system of a liberal democracy, I elaborate their implications for a range of concrete policy problems, with emphasis on cases in Asia. In the process, I look beyond classic corruption concerns, to examine broader conundrums concerning reforms of morally repugnant practices against the background of uncertainty and instability and demonstrate how ideas concerning the people's integrity and property can guide our thinking about the international aspects of entrenched corruption.
Shmuel received his PhD in political science from Yale University in 2016. His research focuses on the moral assessment of global politics. This focus is informed by social science, by the history of political thought, and by a methodological emphasis on the practical task of political philosophy.
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RSVP on or before Monday 31 July 2017 , by email gai@griffith.edu.au , or by phone x54705