The University of Sheffield
Department of Philosophy

Holly Lawford Smith

HLS

PhD

Research Interests

I am interested in ideal and non-ideal theory, ought implies can, political possibility, feasibility constraints, collective action problems and coordination problems, political decision-making and practical reasoning, state agency, climate change, and in general questions about human psychological and cultural malleability, and how it affects the chances of political reform.

I wrote my PhD thesis on an analysis of feasibility for use in Political Theory. Feasibility is something that people talk about a lot (or at least, they talk about theories being 'ideal' or 'utopian' or 'unrealistic' or 'infeasible', vs. their being 'non-ideal', 'realistic', 'feasible') but no one really clarifies what they mean, and I think this causes some talking past one another. So in the first part of my thesis I do some conceptual analysis on feasibility, and try to say what kinds of facts we need to appeal to in order to establish that a proposal for reform is feasible, or isn't. In the second part I try to apply that discussion, and I talk about individual motivations in addressing global poverty, and also the chances of successful international cooperation between states.

Selected Publications

Email address:

h.lawford-smith@sheffield.ac.uk