François Tanguay-Renaud (York University – Osgoode Hall Law School) has posted Making Sense of ‘Public’ Emergencies on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This is the penultimate draft of a paper that will appear, in a revised form, in Philosophy of Management (formerly Reason in Practice). The paper seeks to clarify the notion of ‘public emergency’ and to address various theoretical misconceptions surrounding it. Public emergencies, I contend, are emergencies which interfere with the performance of a government’s role and which, as a result, tend to have distinctive moral implications. Since their salient characteristics often vary markedly, I argue that one must pay close attention to them when assessing what responses they warrant. I use as my foil three leading theoretical approaches which I challenge and seek to reconstruct: (1) Tom Sorell’s focus on worst-case scenarios and conflation of distinctively salient ‘public’ emergencies; (2) Michael Walzer’s ‘supreme emergencies’ and their alleged ability to make some governmental immoralities moral; and (3) Giorgio Agamben’s insistence on a declaration of emergency as the salient moral and legal mark of a public emergency. Overall, I aim to set the stage for further discussion of the specific implications of public emergencies for the law.