Browsing by Author "Staruski, Joseph"

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    Liberalism and the Conflict of Restraint
    (2020) Staruski, Joseph; Yurdin, Joel
    John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is an extremely important work of contemporary liberalism that sets up the theoretical framework for a defense of liberal social contract deontology. Michael Sandel, a communitarian, tries to criticize Rawls on the grounds that his liberal political theory will produce alienated and dislocated individuals without clear or thickly-constituted identities. Rawls replies to the communitarian critique by differentiating between the institutional (public) and non-institutional (moral) identities, but fails to address the ethical/metaphysical considerations that are needed to fully account for the communitarian critique. Rawls tries to place ‘communitarian values' within the non-institutional sphere, but since the institutional and non-institutional collapse into the same person who is at once citizen and moral individual, he creates what I call the ‘conflict of restraint.' I will explore how existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir's ethics of freedom help to advance the liberal argument against Sandel's criticisms while also affirming the criticism or Rawls' presumed impartiality. Beauvoir's perspective is analogous to A Theory of Justice in some ways. Beauvoir and Rawls share a similar conception of self and a similar dualism between universal and particular. If seen as a Rawlsian moral identity, Beauvoir's existentialist ethics helps to solve the conflict of restraint by bringing into line otherwise conflicting interests. The existentialist perspective at once shows the potential to bring forward a new way of thinking about justice and addresses the communitarian critique by providing an ethical/metaphysical paradigm to ground liberal claims of goodness.
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    Prayers for Politicians Religion and the Public Sphere
    (2020) Staruski, Joseph; McDonogh, Gary W.
    Polarization and divisive politics have led to a distrust in American institutions and contributed to a decline in social capitol. For over a decade, the academic literature has ignored the topic of declining social capitol assuming that new forms of connection have replaced the old. Social media and digital technologies, however, are not a sufficient replacement for in-person forms of interaction. This study focuses on two cases of protestant religious institutions in a major American city and analyzes their power structures and communication methods using observations and thematic analysis. It finds that the church can be seen as a ‘nexus of community engagement' because it can help congregants to build social capitol and connect to community resources. That very social capital is also a pre-condition for the rational-critical discourses in the public sphere. Churches, as morally-interested institutions, will sometimes struggle with accessibility among individuals who do not share their moral convictions, but they can be successful at reducing the influence of power dynamics in discourse by democratizing their power structures. Churches will naturally vary in their acceptance of rational-critical discourse and in their levels of solidarity, as do the two case studies. This study explains the embattled relationship between social solidarity and the public sphere, providing useful insights for American citizens and civic leaders.