Justice
4 writings
Ideas that Work
Aeon: A World of Ideas, June 24, 2021.
The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198868705.001.0001
Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas, Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.
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Nietzsches affirmative Genealogien
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67 (3): 429–439. By invitation. 2019. doi:10.1515/dzph-2019-0034
Argues that alongside his well-known critical genealogies, Nietzsche also developed “affirmative genealogies” that are not historically situated. These genealogies investigate the “practical origins” of concepts like justice and truth, showing how they arise instrumentally from fundamental human needs. By presenting these concepts as naturalistically intelligible and practically indispensable, this approach offers an affirmative justification, which I connect to Nietzsche’s later idea of an “economic justification of morality.”
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Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice
British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 727–49. 2017. doi:10.1080/09608788.2016.1266462
Examines Nietzsche’s view that the ideal of justice is a contingent political development emerging only when parties of roughly equal power need a system of exchange and requital to avoid mutually assured destruction, meaning the applicability of norms of justice is originally tied to distributions of power. This perspective reframes justice as a human-made solution to the recurring problem of social order. Understanding these origins vindicates justice as an indispensable invention for social life.
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