Lea Ypi: What is Political Progress?

The Institute of Philosophy at the University of Iceland, in collaboration with the Institute of Public Administration and Politics and Reykjavík International Literary Festival, hosts a public talk by Lea Ypi in the lecture hall of the National Museum of Iceland on April 20 at 3pm-4:30pm. Lea Ypi is a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in political philosophy and has written influential work on, among other things, political justice, colonialism and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Ypi is also the author of the bestselling book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, where Ypi combines autobiographical elements with ideas from political philosophy.

Further information about Lea Ypi may be found on her website: https://leaypi.com/

Abstract in English:

Progress is both a necessary and a dangerous idea. It is necessary if one is striving to improve the way things are, and it is dangerous because the pursuit of progress has often given rise to episodes of paternalism, colonial domination and narratives of civilisational superiority. My paper aims to defend a more critical account of progress. It starts by distinguishing between moral and political progress, then it explores the relation between political progress and justice. It suggests that we make political progress not when we approximate an ideal of justice that is always known to us, but when the political institutions we construct reflect what we learn from the trials and failures of the past. To outline how such learning processes might take place, I defend the idea that the basic function of justice is to regulate the coercive use of power. I further explain how we should understand progress in the norms of justice as the result of cumulative processes of evolution of different views of how power ought to be exercised.