David Wiens

• Demands of Justice, Feasible Alternatives, and the Need for Causal Analysis
• Forthcoming in Ethical Theory & Moral Practice. [PDF]
• A handout summarizing the argument.
• Many political philosophers hold the Feasible Alternatives Principle (FAP): justice demands that we implement some reform of international institutions P only if P is feasible and P improves upon the status quo from the standpoint of justice. The FAP implies that any argument for a requirement to implement P must incorporate claims whose content pertains to extant causal processes. Yet, philosophers routinely neglect the need to attend to actual causal processes. This undermines their arguments concerning moral requirements to reform international institutions. The upshot is that philosophers' arguments must engage in causal analysis to a greater extent than is typical.
• Presented at the American Political Science Association (Seattle, September 2011); Australian National University, Social & Political Theory seminar (Canberra, Nov 2011).
• Prescribing Institutions Without Ideal Theory
• The Journal of Political Philosophy 20.1 (2012): 45-70. [PDF]
• It is conventional wisdom among political philosophers that ideal principles of justice (i.e., principles that would regulate the constitutions of fully just institutional arrangements) must guide our attempts to design institutions to avert actual injustice. Call this the ideal guidance approach. I argue that this view is misguided—ideal principles of justice are not appropriate "guiding principles" that actual institutions must aim to realize, even if only approximately. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is also avoidable. In this paper, I develop an alternative approach to institutional design, which I call institutional failure analysis. The basic intuition of this approach is that our moral assessment of institutional proposals is most effective when we proceed from a detailed understanding of the causal processes generating problematic social outcomes. Failure analysis takes the institutional primary design task to be obviating or averting institutional failures. Consequently, failure analysis enables theorists to prescribe more effective solutions to actual injustice because its focuses on understanding the injustice, rather than specifying an ideal of justice.
• Presented at the British Society for Ethical Theory (Nottingham, July 2010)

• Achieving Global Justice: Why Failures Matter More Than Ideals
• Invited contribution to Kate Brennan (ed.), Making Global Institutions Work: Power, Accountability, and Change, under contract with Routledge.
• Abstract to come.
• Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty Revisited
• Down for revision
• Presented at the Canadian Political Science Association, workshop on Global Governance and Global Justice (Waterloo, May 2011); Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (Canberra, August 2011); Monash Political Theory Workshop, (Melbourne, March 2012)
• Evaluating Design Hypotheses with Formal Models
• Down for revision.
• Presented at Canadian Political Science Association, workshop on Nonideal Theory and Institutional Theory (Montreal, June 2010)
• Feasibility in Political Philosophy: Mapping the Conceptual Terrain
• Conventional wisdom suggests that, to be action-guiding, a political theory must prescribe feasible states of affairs. Accordingly, political philosophers have increasingly turned their attention to methodological questions regarding the extent to which feasibility considerations properly constrain normative theorizing. But before we can apply the insights from these methodological debates, we require a clear sense of the logic of feasibility. Philosophers have had little to say on this issue, at least partly for want of a suitably rigorous analysis of the concept of feasibility. My aim is to address this shortfall. I argue that feasibility is well understood in terms of demandingness. Roughly, realizing a state of affairs is demanding to the extent that it makes claims on our capacity to realize alternate states of affairs that are difficult to satisfy jointly. Given this, realizing a prescribed state is infeasible just in case it is prohibitively demanding; realizing the state is otherwise feasible. Realizing one state is relatively more feasible than realizing another just in case realizing the former is less demanding than realizing the latter. Given this analysis, I argue that we can straightforwardly model feasibility judgments using possible worlds. Hence, a familiar approach to analyzing the logic of possibility more generally can be fruitfully employed for analyzing the logic of feasibility. I conclude by considering and dismissing the challenges posed by alternative conceptual analyses suggested in the literature.
• Presented at the Australian National University, School of Philosophy (Canberra, Sep 2011); University of Sydney, Dept of Philosophy (Sydney, Mar 2012)
• Is There a Political Resource Curse? A Theoretical and Empirical Re-Evaluation
    (with William Roberts Clark, Matt Golder, Sona Golder, and Paul Poast)
• The long-standing claim that natural resources are positively associated with authoritarianism has been challenged by several recent studies. In this paper, we argue that the debate over the existence of a political resource curse suffers from considerable theoretical and empirical confusion. We seek to resolve this confusion by presenting a general institutional theory of the resource curse that consolidates and extends several strands in the existing literature. Our theory indicates that if domestic institutions fail to constrain political leaders' discretion over fiscal policy prior to the onset of resource dependence, then ongoing resource dependence allows incumbents to (mis)allocate revenue in ways that consolidate authoritarian rule. To test our hypotheses, we estimate a dynamic logit model using data from 101 countries. As predicted, we find that greater resource dependence increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. Our analysis indicates that the political resource curse is best understood as a theory linking resource dependence to authoritarian persistence.
• Natural Resources, Institutional Development, and the Demands of Justice
• Down for revision.
• Presented at the 2nd Annual Dutch Conference on Practical Philosophy (Groningen, October 2010).
• Power and Politics: Insights from an Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Game
    (with William Roberts Clark, Matt Golder, Sona Golder, and Paul Poast)
• Down for revision.
• Preserving Harm
• The distinction between doing harm and allowing harm is too crude to capture the descriptive and moral distinctiveness of important intermediate cases. Barry and Øverland (2011) introduce the category of enabling harm to address this challenge. But the doing/enabling/allowing distinction is still too crude. In this paper, I present a family of cases that pose two types of problems for this distinction. First, the extant distinction misdescribes the relevant agents' relationship to harm in the cases I present. Second, the extant distinction fails to capture salient moral differences between the cases I present and the paradigm cases of doing, enabling, and allowing harm. I argue that a fourth category—that of preserving harm—captures the salient descriptive and moral features of these problem cases.

• Engineering Global Justice: Achieving Success Through Failure Analysis
• [PDF]
• My dissertation develops a novel approach to institutional analysis and begins to apply this approach to debates in the international justice literature. The main innovation of this institutional failure analysis approach is to ground our normative evaluation of institutions on a detailed understanding of the causal processes that generate problematic social outcomes. Chapters 1 and 2 motivate the need for this new approach, showing that philosophers' neglect of causal explanations of global poverty leads extant normative analyses of poverty astray. The upshot is that causal (as opposed to moral) analyses of social outcomes must play a more central role than is typical in philosophers' moral assessment of institutional arrangements. Chapter 3 introduces and outlines the failure analysis framework.
• Chapters 5 and 6 employ the failure analysis approach to address recent debate concerning an example of severe deprivation caused by institutional failure— the economic stagnation and authoritarian governance associated with natural resource dependence. Chapter 5 articulates a causal explanation of this so-called "resource curse." I claim that the curse occurs when a resource dependent country's domestic institutional structure permits the political leaders to disregard citizens' interests. My argument enumerates the conditions under which state leaders choose to advance citizens' interests. In chapter 6, I show that extant prescriptions to address the resource curse fail to satisfy at least one necessary condition for mitigating the resource curse. In particular, I highlight the importance of providing citizens with credible exit options both as necessary to successfully mitigating the resource curse and as being among the best forms of compensation to curse victims. I then explore the feasibility of various options for helping curse victims avoid absorbing the consequences of their resource-cursed situation. I end by tentatively proposing a strategy for mitigating the resource curse that satisfies the necessary conditions for a successful prescription as identified by the explanation in chapter 5.

My research focuses on the ethics and politics of development. In particular, I investigate the strategic aspects of interactions between citizens and the state and what this implies for our obligations to the residents of underdeveloped countries. My research comprises two interrelated projects, one substantive and the other methodological. The first explores feasible institutional reforms to avert or mitigate the acute deprivations often associated with underdevelopment, as well as the obligations of developed states to implement such reforms. The methodological project is motivated by dissatisfaction with extant attempts to address these substantive concerns. I develop an approach to theorizing about political principles that I call institutional failure analysis. The main innovation of this approach is to ground our evaluation of institutional arrangements on a detailed understanding of the causal processes that generate problematic outcomes; this is opposed to comparing actual institutional arrangements with an ideal institutional structure.

News

Feb 2012: I will be Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, starting in July 2013.

Jan 2012: "Demands of Justice, Feasible Alternatives, and the Need for Causal Analysis" is now forthcoming in Ethical Theory & Moral Practice