Kevin Vallier Speaks on Political Stability

Kevin Vallier from Bowling Green State University will give a talk on the topic “Three Concepts of Political Stability” at Virginia Tech. The talk takes place on March 02, 2016, from 4-6 PM in Surge 117a. The talk is tailored to appeal to both students and faculty, with plenty of time for discussion and interaction with the guest speaker. You are cordially invited to attend.

Here is the abstract of the talk: The dominant approach to state legitimacy in political philosophy, public reason liberalism, includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions reach a kind of self-enforcing equilibrium. Citizens of a stable society generally recognize that all, or nearly all, people have sufficient reason to comply with directives issued by publicly justified institutions, such that unilateral deviations from those directives leads to a worse outcome from the defector’s point of view. In this talk, I contend that a more sophisticated model of social stability, specifically an agent-based model, yields a richer and more accurate ideal of political stability than what has appeared in the literature thus far. In particular, an agent-based model helps us to distinguish between three concepts of political stability: durability, balance, and immunity. A well-ordered society is one that possesses a high degree of social trust and cooperative behavior among its citizens (durability) with low short-run variability (balance). A well-ordered society also resists destabilization caused by non-compliant agents in or entering the system (immunity). Previous work on political stability within public reason liberalism has depended upon a single, coherent notion of stability. My tripartite distinction weakens attempts to elaborate, defend, and refute public reason views that employ a single, coherent notion of stability.