Hoover Tuesdays: The Hoover Chair Research Seminar, since 1998

The Hoover Chair Research Seminar by Victor MARDELLAT (Chaire Hoover)

The teleological conception of practical reasons (hereafter, ‘TCR’) claims that (i) every intentional action must aim at some result, and infers from this that (ii) all practical reasons are a function of the (un)desirability of the available outcomes. Douglas Portmore, TCR’s leading defender, offers two reasons for accepting it. First, if intentional actions are teleological in the sense specified by (i), then it is natural to suppose that the reasons for performing them are also teleological. Second, (ii) promises to unify all reasons for action under a single framework. Such unification, however, would be an explanatory advantage only if it did not require denying the existence of genuine reasons for action or distorting them. I argue that (i) is not as intuitive as Portmore claims, and that TCR fails adequately to capture all reasons for action. This matters in part because TCR is one of the main assumptions that generate the famous ‘paradox of deontology.’

The Hoover Chair Research Seminar by Christophe SENTE (Associate Researcher at Cevipol, ULB)

Hayek’s constitutional theory is valuable not only because it illuminates the current dysfunctions of liberal democracies, but because it offers a prescriptive framework for thinking beyond them. His defense of individual liberty leads him to advocate demarchy: an institutional innovation designed to protect the constitutional order from the short-term turbulence of party-driven politics. Yet Hayek’s proposal contains a significant blind spot. By grounding representation exclusively in individuals, he overlooks the democratic relevance of integrating enterprises and economic actors more directly into political institutions. Strengthening institutions that give voice to enterprises, professions, and organized civil society may offer a way to restore a durable nomos within liberal democracies.

The Hoover Chair Research Seminar by Axel GOSSERIES (Chaire Hoover) & Manuel SA VALENTE (UMinho & Chaire Hoover) 

To better address long-term issues, some advocate granting extra power to younger generations. While persuasive at first, this argument faces three serious challenges. The "future votes" challenge points to the fact that younger generations will have more power in the future anyway. The "divergence" objection suggests that reasons to adjust power to “stakes” might not align in the case of youth empowerment. Finally, the “attitude dynamics” challenge stresses that the future political views of the young may differ from those they hold today. These challenges, we argue, render the case for youth empowerment much harder to defend than initially thought.

The Hoover Chair Seminar Research by Jamie DRAPER (Utrecht University; Hoover Chair Visiting Fellow)

Decarbonisation is creating significant demand for so-called ‘critical minerals’ such as lithium, cobalt, and copper. These resources are highly valuable in the context of the climate transition, but their extraction also creates significant ecological and social costs and involves exploitative economic arrangements. This appears to create a climate–extractivism dilemma: on the one hand, aggressive climate mitigation appears to come at the cost of imposing significant harms from extractivism; on the other hand, avoiding the harms of extractivism appears to hold back the project of climate mitigation. In this paper, I examine three possible responses to this apparent dilemma from a broadly egalitarian point of view: reducing, onshoring, and reforming extraction. I argue that an egalitarian justice requires a judicious combination of all three, but that reforming is generally preferable to onshoring and reducing extraction, at least where it is feasible and does not conflict with the morally legitimate claims of local communities. But the precise combination of measures that egalitarians should endorse will depend on a set of assumptions about political feasibility and on the claims made by communities on the extractive frontier. 

The Hoover Chair Research Seminar by Jonas Vandieken (LMU)

Any adequate moral theory of ‘what we owe to each other’ better make sense of the idea that we owe each person respect. A moral theory that appears well equipped to account for what I shall call relational recognition respect and the constraint it places on moral deliberation is the relational theory of morality recently developed by R. Jay Wallace in ‘The Moral Nexus’ (2019). I shall argue, however, that Wallace’s own relational proposal is at risk of ultimately falling short of properly accommodating relational recognition respect and the deliberative constraint imposed by it. The reason for this shortfall is Wallace’s adherence to Principle Contractualism as the correct model of relational moral deliberation. According to Principle Contractualism and its central idea of hypothetical justifiability to generic others, claims function at best as outputs of moral deliberation. But relational recognition respect requires not merely that deliberation issue in an obligation owed to a generic another identified as the relevant claim-holder, but that the other’s actual claims figure as inputs into a distinctively relational mode of moral deliberation to determine how they may act. As such, I argue that proponents of a relational moral theory like Wallace should give up on Principle Contractualism without having to give up on moral contractualism as such. A relational moral theory in fact lends itself much closer to a relational version of what has come to be known as Act Contractualism.

The Hoover Chair Seminar Research by Cécile DEGIOVANNI (Universités Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

The Hoover Chair Seminar by Pierre-Étienne VANDAMME (Chaire Hoover)

Presentation of the book Agir face aux injustices. Une éthique de la citoyenneté (Éliott, 2026)

Starting from very concrete questions (Do we have a duty to work? To vote? To obey unjust laws? To share our wealth?), the book examines the mutual obligations arising from social cooperation from the perspective of moral contractualism. Drawing on G. A. Cohen’s defense of an egalitarian ethos, it engages in a form of political moral philosophy, paying close attention to inequality, the social circumstances in which people act, and institutional solutions that facilitate the fulfilment of our moral duties.

The Hoover Chair Seminar by Simon VÖHRINGER (Princeton University)