Alexandra Oprea
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 376083 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alexandra Oprea |
| PRENOMES | Alexandra |
| SOBRENOME | Oprea |
| ASSINATURA | OPREA A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7968-932X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 18 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 18 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Rousseau’s Emile
Rousseau famously claimed that one must choose between educating a man and educating a citizen. The traditional reading of Emile sees the protagonist Emile as a man rather than a citizen. Revisionist readings instead argue that Emile is both a good man and a good citizen and that his education prepares him for the model of citizenship outlined in the Social Contract. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation. I argue that Emile is indeed a go…
A Transnational Approach to Anti-Corruption in Socialist Romania (1971-1989)
Manipulation in politics and public policy
Many philosophical accounts of manipulation are blind to the extent to which actual people fall short of the rational ideal, while prominent accounts in political science are under-inclusive. We offer necessary and sufficient conditions – Suitable Reason and Testimonial Honesty – distinguishing manipulative from non-manipulative influence; develop a ‘hypothetical disclosure test’ to measure the degree of manipulation; and provide further criteria…
Behind anti-corruption, the transformations of society—investigation into the politicization of “illegal personal enrichment” in Romania
This article adopts a Durkheimian perspective and employs a socio-pragmatic method of inquiry, with a specific focus on analyzing “scandals” as critical junctures and the interpretations provided by social actors. The aim is to explore the development of corruption as a social issue in Romania over the past four decades. In contrast to two prevailing explanatory approaches in Romania, labeled here as fatalistic and voluntarist , we propose a more…
Freedom of speech on campus
What should be the rules governing campus speech in a liberal democratic society? On one side are those arguing for maximal protections for campus speech analogous to the First Amendment in the United States. On the other are those promoting stricter regulation of speech through formal and informal speech codes. This paper aims to carve a new path in the conversation. Both sides agree that the mission of the university is the discovery and dissem…
A minimal standard of democratic competence
The ability to identify which citizens are democratically competent and which fall beneath the relevant standard of competence bears on numerous questions in democratic theory. These include questions about the distribution of the franchise, the type of civic education that democratic governments should provide to their citizens, and how we might prevent democratic backsliding. In this paper, we aim to identify and defend a criterion of minimal d…
Moving toward the Median
Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backslidi…
Nudges, Regulations and Liberty
Nudge advocates contend that nudges are liberty preserving, while government regulations are not. We interrogate that assumption by considering negative liberty in the forms suggested by the proponents of nudges. Specifically, we examine three ways of measuring negative liberty – liberty as freedom of choice, liberty as absence of coercion and liberty as absence of interference – applying the measures to a case study relevant to the nudge literat…
Adam Smith on Political Judgment
How should the ordinary citizens of commercial societies navigate increasingly complex political landscapes characterized by global markets, specialization, and manipulation by special interests? In this article, I refer to the gap between the demands of political judgment and the capacities of ordinary citizens as the "political judgment problem," and I argue, drawing on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that versions of this problem have existed …
François Fénelon
Ryan Patrick Hanley makes two original claims about François Fénelon: (1) that he is best regarded as a political philosopher, and (2) that his political philosophy is best understood as “moderate and modern.” In what follows, I raise two concerns about Hanley’s revisionist turn. First, I argue that the role of philosophy in Fénelon’s account is rather as a handmaiden of theology than as an autonomous area of inquiry—with implications for both th…
Counterproductive Altruism
First, we argue that the appeal of effective altruism (henceforth, EA) depends significantly on a certain empirical premise we call the Heavy Tail Hypothesis (HTH), which characterizes the probability distribution of opportunities for doing good. Roughly, the HTH implies that the best causes, interventions, or charities produce orders of magnitude greater good than the average ones, constituting a substantial portion of the total amount of good c…
Pluralism in political philosophy
The papers by Keith Dowding and Adrian Walsh debate whether political philosophy belongs within political science or whether it belongs within philosophy. It is my contention that the two contributions largely agree about the descriptive level, but disagree at the prescriptive and potentially at the institutional level. I conclude with a brief argument in favour of a pluralist approach to the big questions in political philosophy. By 'pluralist a…
Inadequate for democracy
There is widespread agreement among philosophers and legal scholars that the distribution of educational resources in the US is unjust, but little agreement about why. An increasingly prominent view posits a sufficientarian standard based on the requirements of democratic citizenship. This view, which I refer to as democratic sufficientarianism, argues that inequalities in educational resources or opportunities above the threshold required for de…
Compassion’s More Dangerous Allies
What kind of moral and sentimental education should we pursue under non-ideal circumstances? In states characterized by high inequality and imperfect political institutions, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ethics of care and the politics of compassion. In response, critics have raised concerns that compassion is too weak to serve politically salutary goals. Drawing on the moral and political psychology of Emile, this arti…
Dissertation List
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Pluralism and the General Will
How should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau'sSocial Contractprovides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population…
Romani Feminism in Reactionary Times
This essay discusses the current climate of anti-Romani racism and how it complicates the ability to articulate a feminist stance. The author begins with her own narrative of an incident illustrating the transnational nature of anti-Romani racism. The essay continues by describing issues faced by Romanian Roma in Europe, including mass deportations, extreme poverty, and struggles over naming. It mostly focuses on Roma from Romania, but the analys…
The Arranged Marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba, Intra-Community Oppression and Romani Feminist Ideals
This article discusses the politics behind the recently publicized arranged marriage of a 12-year-old Romani girl, Ana Maria Cioaba. It speaks to the anti-Romani racism in Romania and abroad inherent in the media portrayal of the marriage and criticizes the racist politics behind the involvement of the different political figures in an effort to ‘save’ Ms Cioaba. It also discusses the implications of the media’s obsession with the ‘exotic’ oppres…
The Arranged Marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba, Intra-Community Oppression and Romani Feminist Ideals
This article discusses the politics behind the recently publicized arranged marriage of a 12-year-old Romani girl, Ana Maria Cioaba. It speaks to the anti-Romani racism in Romania and abroad inherent in the media portrayal of the marriage and criticizes the racist politics behind the involvement of the different political figures in an effort to ‘save’ Ms Cioaba. It also discusses the implications of the media’s obsession with the ‘exotic’ oppres…
Romani Feminism in Reactionary Times
This essay discusses the current climate of anti-Romani racism and how it complicates the ability to articulate a feminist stance. The author begins with her own narrative of an incident illustrating the transnational nature of anti-Romani racism. The essay continues by describing issues faced by Romanian Roma in Europe, including mass deportations, extreme poverty, and struggles over naming. It mostly focuses on Roma from Romania, but the analys…
Nudges, Regulations and Liberty
Nudge advocates contend that nudges are liberty preserving, while government regulations are not. We interrogate that assumption by considering negative liberty in the forms suggested by the proponents of nudges. Specifically, we examine three ways of measuring negative liberty – liberty as freedom of choice, liberty as absence of coercion and liberty as absence of interference – applying the measures to a case study relevant to the nudge literat…
Pluralism and the General Will
How should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau'sSocial Contractprovides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population…
Adam Smith on Political Judgment
How should the ordinary citizens of commercial societies navigate increasingly complex political landscapes characterized by global markets, specialization, and manipulation by special interests? In this article, I refer to the gap between the demands of political judgment and the capacities of ordinary citizens as the "political judgment problem," and I argue, drawing on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that versions of this problem have existed …
Pluralism in political philosophy
The papers by Keith Dowding and Adrian Walsh debate whether political philosophy belongs within political science or whether it belongs within philosophy. It is my contention that the two contributions largely agree about the descriptive level, but disagree at the prescriptive and potentially at the institutional level. I conclude with a brief argument in favour of a pluralist approach to the big questions in political philosophy. By 'pluralist a…
A minimal standard of democratic competence
The ability to identify which citizens are democratically competent and which fall beneath the relevant standard of competence bears on numerous questions in democratic theory. These include questions about the distribution of the franchise, the type of civic education that democratic governments should provide to their citizens, and how we might prevent democratic backsliding. In this paper, we aim to identify and defend a criterion of minimal d…
Moving toward the Median
Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backslidi…
Inadequate for democracy
There is widespread agreement among philosophers and legal scholars that the distribution of educational resources in the US is unjust, but little agreement about why. An increasingly prominent view posits a sufficientarian standard based on the requirements of democratic citizenship. This view, which I refer to as democratic sufficientarianism, argues that inequalities in educational resources or opportunities above the threshold required for de…
Compassion’s More Dangerous Allies
What kind of moral and sentimental education should we pursue under non-ideal circumstances? In states characterized by high inequality and imperfect political institutions, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ethics of care and the politics of compassion. In response, critics have raised concerns that compassion is too weak to serve politically salutary goals. Drawing on the moral and political psychology of Emile, this arti…
The Arranged Marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba, Intra-Community Oppression and Romani Feminist Ideals
This article discusses the politics behind the recently publicized arranged marriage of a 12-year-old Romani girl, Ana Maria Cioaba. It speaks to the anti-Romani racism in Romania and abroad inherent in the media portrayal of the marriage and criticizes the racist politics behind the involvement of the different political figures in an effort to ‘save’ Ms Cioaba. It also discusses the implications of the media’s obsession with the ‘exotic’ oppres…
Romani Feminism in Reactionary Times
This essay discusses the current climate of anti-Romani racism and how it complicates the ability to articulate a feminist stance. The author begins with her own narrative of an incident illustrating the transnational nature of anti-Romani racism. The essay continues by describing issues faced by Romanian Roma in Europe, including mass deportations, extreme poverty, and struggles over naming. It mostly focuses on Roma from Romania, but the analys…
Dissertation List
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Pluralism and the General Will
How should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau'sSocial Contractprovides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population…
Counterproductive Altruism
First, we argue that the appeal of effective altruism (henceforth, EA) depends significantly on a certain empirical premise we call the Heavy Tail Hypothesis (HTH), which characterizes the probability distribution of opportunities for doing good. Roughly, the HTH implies that the best causes, interventions, or charities produce orders of magnitude greater good than the average ones, constituting a substantial portion of the total amount of good c…
Pluralism in political philosophy
The papers by Keith Dowding and Adrian Walsh debate whether political philosophy belongs within political science or whether it belongs within philosophy. It is my contention that the two contributions largely agree about the descriptive level, but disagree at the prescriptive and potentially at the institutional level. I conclude with a brief argument in favour of a pluralist approach to the big questions in political philosophy. By 'pluralist a…
Inadequate for democracy
There is widespread agreement among philosophers and legal scholars that the distribution of educational resources in the US is unjust, but little agreement about why. An increasingly prominent view posits a sufficientarian standard based on the requirements of democratic citizenship. This view, which I refer to as democratic sufficientarianism, argues that inequalities in educational resources or opportunities above the threshold required for de…
Compassion’s More Dangerous Allies
What kind of moral and sentimental education should we pursue under non-ideal circumstances? In states characterized by high inequality and imperfect political institutions, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ethics of care and the politics of compassion. In response, critics have raised concerns that compassion is too weak to serve politically salutary goals. Drawing on the moral and political psychology of Emile, this arti…
François Fénelon
Ryan Patrick Hanley makes two original claims about François Fénelon: (1) that he is best regarded as a political philosopher, and (2) that his political philosophy is best understood as “moderate and modern.” In what follows, I raise two concerns about Hanley’s revisionist turn. First, I argue that the role of philosophy in Fénelon’s account is rather as a handmaiden of theology than as an autonomous area of inquiry—with implications for both th…
Adam Smith on Political Judgment
How should the ordinary citizens of commercial societies navigate increasingly complex political landscapes characterized by global markets, specialization, and manipulation by special interests? In this article, I refer to the gap between the demands of political judgment and the capacities of ordinary citizens as the "political judgment problem," and I argue, drawing on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that versions of this problem have existed …
Nudges, Regulations and Liberty
Nudge advocates contend that nudges are liberty preserving, while government regulations are not. We interrogate that assumption by considering negative liberty in the forms suggested by the proponents of nudges. Specifically, we examine three ways of measuring negative liberty – liberty as freedom of choice, liberty as absence of coercion and liberty as absence of interference – applying the measures to a case study relevant to the nudge literat…
A Transnational Approach to Anti-Corruption in Socialist Romania (1971-1989)
Manipulation in politics and public policy
Many philosophical accounts of manipulation are blind to the extent to which actual people fall short of the rational ideal, while prominent accounts in political science are under-inclusive. We offer necessary and sufficient conditions – Suitable Reason and Testimonial Honesty – distinguishing manipulative from non-manipulative influence; develop a ‘hypothetical disclosure test’ to measure the degree of manipulation; and provide further criteria…
Behind anti-corruption, the transformations of society—investigation into the politicization of “illegal personal enrichment” in Romania
This article adopts a Durkheimian perspective and employs a socio-pragmatic method of inquiry, with a specific focus on analyzing “scandals” as critical junctures and the interpretations provided by social actors. The aim is to explore the development of corruption as a social issue in Romania over the past four decades. In contrast to two prevailing explanatory approaches in Romania, labeled here as fatalistic and voluntarist , we propose a more…
Freedom of speech on campus
What should be the rules governing campus speech in a liberal democratic society? On one side are those arguing for maximal protections for campus speech analogous to the First Amendment in the United States. On the other are those promoting stricter regulation of speech through formal and informal speech codes. This paper aims to carve a new path in the conversation. Both sides agree that the mission of the university is the discovery and dissem…
A minimal standard of democratic competence
The ability to identify which citizens are democratically competent and which fall beneath the relevant standard of competence bears on numerous questions in democratic theory. These include questions about the distribution of the franchise, the type of civic education that democratic governments should provide to their citizens, and how we might prevent democratic backsliding. In this paper, we aim to identify and defend a criterion of minimal d…
Moving toward the Median
Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backslidi…
Rousseau’s Emile
Rousseau famously claimed that one must choose between educating a man and educating a citizen. The traditional reading of Emile sees the protagonist Emile as a man rather than a citizen. Revisionist readings instead argue that Emile is both a good man and a good citizen and that his education prepares him for the model of citizenship outlined in the Social Contract. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation. I argue that Emile is indeed a go…
Political science (16 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Politics (14 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras) · Economics (8 obras) · Epistemology (7 obras) · Law and economics (7 obras) · Philosophy (7 obras)