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Sen’s purpose in this comparatively short chapter seems to be to draw a distinction between principles of justice that focus on institutions and those that focus on behaviour and so on consequences, and then condemn “institutionally fundamentalist” principles for failing to take account of what actually happens. This distinction is supposed to be illuminated or perhaps even typified by a contrast Sen begins the chapter with, between the policies of two figures from Indian history, Ashoka and Kautilya. Ashoka, having seen at firsthand the horrors of coercion and violence during a campaign to extend his empire, apparently renounced the normal means of exercising power and instead exhorted his subjects to behave virtuously in a way that Sen reads as showing that he equated moral knowledge and moral motivation in a rather simplistic way. Indeed, as Sen notes, part of the reason that the political order did not totally collapse once Ashoka gave up on enforcing his will through force seems to have been that the administrative reforms implemented by his grandfather’s advisor, Kautilya, had a life of their own. The idea appears to be that focussing on institutions exhibits Ashoka’s utopian idealism about the possibility of spontaneous moral reform whereas focussing on behaviour and its consequences is more like Kautilya’s pragmatic acceptance of human fallibility.

This contrast though, is a different one from the one between institutions and consequences as the relevant units of moral assessment. Since, as Sen makes clear, Kautilya’s reforms were institutional reforms, it could hardly be the same one. The reason for this is that what one thinks are the relevant units of moral assessment and how one thinks about the possibilities for human motivation are two, perhaps related, but nonetheless clearly distinct questions. Blain I think has already mentioned that Sen’s reading of Rawls in this kind of area may not be entirely sympathetic, but there seem to me other cases where this claim borders on the bizarre. Hobbes, for example, is in Sen’s typology an institutionally-focused theorist, as his focus on the figure of the Sovereign presumably justifies. Yet Hobbes is clearly not of the view that human moral motivation can be improved by moral education in anything like the way that Sen presents Ashoka as being. A focus on institutions rather than behaviour or consequences in stating principles of justice may be for a number of reasons. One is that institutions provide and in a certain sense are stable patterns of coordinated behaviour enforced through sanctions, and so can constrain human behaviour in ways that ensure that it remains within at least an acceptable set of outcomes. This, for example, seems to be Hobbes’ reasoning. Not only does that depend on views of human behaviour that Sen at least implies are anathema to institutionally-focussed theorists and so demonstrate the failure of his attempt to align views of human behaviour with the focus of principles of justice, but it also casts doubt on the way that Sen wants to exclude institutional theorists from having a concern with consequences.

This is, on Sen’s account, not a symmetrical exclusion. Theories which focus on realization may take account of the ways in which the consequences they are supposed to be focussing on are produced; the means to these ends can be incorporated into their assessment. The effect of this definition is to make the struggle that institutionally-focussed theories face more difficult by allowing their opponents access to all the resources they can draw on without any parallel expansion of the tools they can make use of. The way Hobbes, though, thinks about the value of institutions is clearly dependent on their consequences. It is not clear that the consequences have any existence independent of the institutions - part of Hobbes’ case is clearly that the only way out of the State of Nature is through a near-absolute sovereign - but neither is it as if the institutions have virtues independent of the production of those consequences.

Sen acknowledges this at times, as when he observes that the difference principle is clearly an institutional requirement related to consequences: it is the production of a particular set of consequences that mean that institutions fulfil the difference principle, after all. Yet he seems determined to force institutionally-focussed theories into a deontological straitjacket, where his paradigms of institutionally-focussed theory seem to be Nozick and Gauthier, despite the fact that his real target, Rawls, clearly does not think about duties in the same sort of way. Indeed, Rawls’ own critique of libertarianism is precisely that it is not institutionally-focussed in the right way, that libertarians do not have a theory of the basic structure, thinking of it not as the exercise of public power but as analogous to private contract (see for example PL, Lecture VII, §3).

One way of thinking about this would be to think of the sorts of theories that Sen wants to condemn as failing to take proper account of consequences as procedural: a libertarian entitlement theory is roughly procedural, just as Rawls claims that institutions which meet the difference principle are examples of pure procedural justice. Yet there are a variety of different forms of procedural justice, all of which may take some interest in consequences. Whether a procedure’s outcome is appropriate because of the procedure itself or because the procedure tracks some independent criterion, considerations about the state of affairs they realize can be incorporated into their justification. As far as perfect and imperfect procedures go, the independent criterion could relate to outcomes just as it could to deontological considerations, while pure procedures may have their constitutive rules justified on grounds of their consequences; presumably competitive sports are if played to the rules pure procedures, yet changes to their rules can be and are justified on grounds of improving the spectacle.

The pair of contrasts Sen draws and claims are aligned in this chapter then seem to me unhelpful. They do not align, and the polemical use Sen wants to put them to I think relies on skewing the deck against his opponents. Part of this seems to be because of Sen’s insistence that asking “how things are going and whether they can be improved is a constant and inescapable part of the pursuit of justice”. That is why it would be wrong not to make the realization of states of affairs the focus of principles of justice. Notice though, that if the means by which states of affairs come about can be incorporated into their assessment, that this tells us nothing about whether consequences or the means of bringing them about are what can be improved. As long as deontological restraints are part of what matters from the perspective of justice, then until we know what deontological restraints are properly included in assessments of justice, this assertion is perfectly compatible with more or less any theory of justice. More, it is unclear why a perfectly general concern with the state of the world is always and everywhere a part of justice. That it would make you happy and cost me very little to say how much I liked your cooking does not mean that it is a question of justice whether I do. There are ways that things can be good or bad without being about justice, and I am not sure Sen is prepared to acknowledge that.

As its title suggests, this chapter is a critical discussion of Rawls’s political philosophy.  However, the chapter is not Sen’s only critical treatment of Rawls’s ideas in the book: some criticisms noted in the ‘Introduction’ are not developed here but elsewhere, and some criticisms mentioned here are developed further later in the book.  Moreover, the chapter is not entirely critical: Sen begins by recounting his long friendship with Rawls, and about halfway through the chapter Sen identifies seven ‘positive lessons’ from Rawls’s political philosophy.  Nonetheless, the bulk of the chapter is critical of Rawls’s views.

The following three criticisms especially struck me as I was reading the chapter:

1. Sen’s claim that if Rawls acknowledges that unanimity on a conception of justice cannot be achieved, then it follows that Rawls’s entire theory of justice is ‘devastated.’
2. Sen’s claim that Rawls simply assumes that citizens will “spontaneously do what they agreed to do in the original position” (61).
3. Sen’s worry that ‘parochial beliefs’ might adversely affect the selection of principles of justice by the parties within the original position.

I found all three criticisms unconvincing.

1.

Sen restates his pluralism with respect to conceptions of justice: “There are genuinely plural, and sometimes conflicting, general concerns that bear on our understanding of justice” (56-7).  Consequently, he does not think that rational agents invariably will converge on a unique set of principles of justice within the original position.  Sen goes on to note that Rawls, in his later writings, acknowledges that alternative conceptions of justice might be selected by the parties in the original position.

(The picture is actually more complicated than Sen presents.  Not only does Rawls acknowledge that the original position device does not necessitate the selection of the two principles of justice as fairness, given the many different considerations to which the parties might appeal in their deliberations [JF, 133-4], he also claims that the original position device itself is only one way to satisfy the ‘criterion of reciprocity,’ and that other liberal theories might employ different justificatory strategies for arriving at principles of justice that satisfy the criterion of reciprocity [PL, xlviii-xlix].)

According to Sen, while Rawls accepts “that there are incurable problems in getting a unanimous agreement on one set of principles of justice in the original position,” Rawls fails to recognize that this “cannot but have devastating implications for his theory of ‘justice as fairness’”(58).  However, Sen does not seem to provide any argument (as far as I could discern) for this claim.  That is, I could not see why Sen thinks that Rawls’s acknowledgement that there might be a plurality of reasonable liberal conceptions of justice renders Rawls’s overall theory no longer viable.

I think that the most plausible way to understand Rawls’s project (in his writings on political liberalism, at least) is that he is trying to identify and defend what he takes to be the best justified conception of justice available, ‘justice as fairness,’ and to explain to us why he thinks that that conception of justice is the best one (namely, by means of the original position device, etc.).  Rawls hopes that we will agree with him, and that we will, in light of his arguments, achieve a reflective equilibrium in support of the principles of justice as fairness (and subsequently employ those principles when thinking about fundamental political matters).

Rawls acknowledges that this is an ongoing, open-ended democratic process.  As he writes: “…we are in civil society and…the political conception of justice, like any other conception, is always subject to being checked by our reflective considered judgements” [‘Reply to Habermas,’ 153].  Commitment to the principles of justice as fairness does not require or depend upon the achievement of unanimous support for those principles (as far as I can tell).  It is not clear why we should abandon our commitment to justice as fairness (assuming that we have been convinced by Rawls’s arguments) once we acknowledge that other reasonable and rational persons might endorse other liberal conceptions of justice.

Moreover, it is important not to overstate the scope for reasonable disagreement with respect to justice in Rawlsian political liberalism: “The limiting feature of these forms [of reasonable liberalism] is the criterion of reciprocity” [PL, 450].  Thus all reasonable political conceptions of justice (roughly, all conceptions that could be supported by reasonable persons, i.e., persons who acknowledge the fact of reasonable pluralism and are committed to satisfying the criterion of reciprocity) will include three features, according to Rawls.  These features are: (a) a set of basic (liberal democratic) rights and liberties, (b) a ‘special priority’ for these rights and liberties over other considerations of justice, and (c) measures ensuring that all citizens have adequate resources to make effective use of their basic rights and liberties.  Consequently, conceptions of justice like libertarianism and classical utilitarianism remain ‘unreasonable’ and thus ‘off the table’ in Rawlsian political liberalism (libertarianism fails with respect to (c), whereas classical utilitarianism fails with respect to (b)).  Even late Rawls, then, would reject Sen’s ‘flute example’ from the Introduction.  Therefore, the concession that Rawls makes does not look especially harmful to his overall project.  All reasonable liberal conceptions of justice are going to overlap on certain core features.  Their differences simply are not fundamental in nature.  (They concern disagreements over questions like: should the basic liberties have ‘lexical priority,’ or a ‘special weight,’ relative to other considerations of justice’?  In ensuring that all citizens have adequate means to make effective use of their liberties, is the ‘difference principle’ to be preferred, or a weaker ‘sufficientarian’ principle?  Etc.)

Perhaps Sen thinks that unanimity is required for the implementation of the principles of justice, given Rawls’s account of a ‘well-ordered society’?  This is not mentioned at all in the chapter, but I suppose that an argument to this effect might proceed along the following lines.  A fully just society, according to Rawls, is a ‘well-ordered society,’ and in a well-ordered society all reasonable persons endorse the same political conception of justice.  If unanimity on a conception of justice is recognized as unachievable, then a well-ordered society cannot be regarded as a realistic utopia, and so the Rawlsian project crumbles.  (Or so such an argument might go.  Again, Sen does not explicitly make this argument.)

However, I think that the idea of a well-ordered can easily be tweaked from one in which there exists unanimous support for the relevant conception of justice to one in which the basic structure is organized in accordance with a legitimate political conception of justice (one that satisfies the criterion of reciprocity, and thus includes the three features outlined above).  If all reasonable persons in a society acknowledge the legitimacy of the conception of justice that governs their basic structure, that society is ‘well ordered’ in nature, i.e., ‘stable for the right reasons,’ as citizens’ sense of justice is sufficient for them to freely support the conception of justice (even if the conception is not their most preferred one, and they consequently exercise their democratic rights to recommend the adoption of a different conception).  If this modest amendment to the idea of a well-ordered society is plausible, then arguments in favour of a conception of justice that claim that a society organized in accordance with it would be ‘well ordered’ in nature can still be made, that is, the idea of a well-ordered society can continue to play its role in demonstrating the feasibility and legitimacy of a conception of justice (within the second stage of the original position argument).

My apologies for this somewhat lengthy discussion!  The main point that I want to make simply is that Sen provides us with no argument, as far as I can tell, for his claim that Rawls’s acknowledgement that the original position device need not yield a unique set of principles of justice entails the demise of his overall theory.  Moreover, I’m sceptical that such an argument is available.

2.

Sen claims that Rawls’s focus on determining principles of justice for institutions leads him to neglect the ‘actual behaviour’ of people; instead, Rawls simply assumes compliance with the requirements of justice.  Within Rawls’s system, according to Sen, the selection of the principles of justice ensures not only the right choice of institutions, but also the necessary behaviour by citizens (see 69).

This strikes me as clearly incorrect.  On Rawls’s account, political power in an adequately just society is ultimately the “power of free and equal citizens as a collective body.”  Consequently, the question of whether citizens actually can do what is necessary in order to maintain just institutions over time is of central importance to Rawls’s project.  There are no ‘political institutions’ that are independent of citizens’ behaviour: “political power is citizens’ power, which they impose on themselves and one another as free and equal” [JF, 40].  Consequently, there is a vital second stage to the original position, in which the parties determine whether the principles that are selected in the first stage can be stable over time ‘for the right reasons,’ i.e., through the free support of reasonable citizens, given the parties’ knowledge of human psychology, the circumstances of justice, and so forth.

All of Part V of Justice as Fairness is devoted to this question (just as is a substantial part of A Theory of Justice, with its discussion of the ‘strains of commitment,’ the ‘argument for congruence,’ etc.).  While Rawls’s discussion of this stage of the original position is conducted at a high level of generality, the parties in the original position, when determining the stability of justice as fairness, do appeal to general psychological and social facts (as well as the general circumstances of justice, including the fact of reasonable pluralism, etc.).  Consequently, Rawls is not simply assuming that citizens in a just society will ‘spontaneously’ act in accordance with the requirements of justice.  Indeed, failure to demonstrate the stability of a society governed by principles of justice in the second stage of the original position is sufficient to show that those principles must be rejected.  While one might fault the details of Rawls’s discussion of stability, Sen is clearly incorrect in claiming that Rawls simply assumes compliance with the requirements of justice.

Perhaps Sen’s criticism should be construed as levelled against Rawls’s assumption of ‘full compliance’ within a just society?  (The argument in the second stage of the original position is meant to show that ‘full compliance’ by reasonable persons is possible, despite the fact of reasonable pluralism, and in light of, inter alia, general features of human psychology).  If so, this is not stated explicitly by Sen in this chapter.  (Although this reading might be suggested by Sen’s presentation of the “6th exclusion” of Rawls’s theory in chapter four (90).)

Certainly, when trying to realize the principles of justice in non-ideal theory, more specific information concerning ‘actual behaviour’ (including expectations regarding probable levels of non-compliance, the actions of ‘unreasonable’ persons, etc.) needs to be taken into account.  However, I do not see why such considerations would undermine the original position device and the justifiability of the principles of justice derived via that device.  This seems especially to be the case once we keep in mind the different roles of the ‘general conception of justice’ and the ‘special conception of justice’ in Rawls’s theory.  The former provides a threshold account of the requirements of justice by means of which we can judge the justice/injustice of existing, ‘non-ideal’ societies.  The latter conception of justice, in contrast, constitutes a ‘regulative ideal’ for thinking about how to reform existing societies.  Once we keep in mind the different content and roles of these two conceptions of justice in Rawls’s theory, the complaint that Rawls fails to consider adequately the ‘actual behaviour’ of persons does not seem to have much force, in my judgement.

3.

Finally, Sen criticizes Rawls’s social contract approach to thinking about justice for being vulnerable to the problem of ‘parochialism.’  Sen writes: “each country, or each society, may have parochial beliefs that call for more global examination and scrutiny” (71).  Sen pursues this criticism at greater length in chapter six, so perhaps we should postpone discussion of it for later.  Nonetheless, I wanted to note that I find this criticism deeply misguided.  The parties in the original position only know certain very general facts about their society, namely, “that it exists under the circumstances of justice, both objective and subjective, and that reasonably favourable conditions making a constitutional democracy possible obtain” [JF, 87].  Beyond that, when identifying principles of justice (as opposed to just institutions), the parties in the original position do not know more particular information about their society – and, in particular, they do not employ the kinds of country or society-specific beliefs that would give rise to concerns about ‘parochialism.’  It seems that Sen is conflating the original position, in which principles of justice are selected, with the ‘constitutional stage,’ at which point the parties apply the principles of justice to the constitutional structure of a particular society, while remaining ignorant of the particular place of the people whom they represent within that society.  (Even with respect to the ‘constitutional stage,’ though, I find Sen’s concern with ‘parochialism’ misguided.)

In conclusion, I would like to note that while I have not (so far) been very impressed by Sen’s criticisms of alternative accounts of justice, and especially Rawls’s account, I remain hopeful that his ‘positive’ project, his ‘comparativist’ approach to justice, will prove to be more compelling.

(Finally, my apologies for so grotesquely exceeding the recommended word limit!)

The main point of this chapter is to defend a conception of objectivity in our normative thinking about justice.  Against critics of the ‘Enlightenment tradition,’ Sen defends the idea that we should understand reason as the “ultimate arbitrator of ethical beliefs.”  This is not because “reasoned scrutiny” can provide us with “any sure-fire way of getting things exactly right,” but rather because ethical thinking requires us to be “as objective as we reasonably can,” and reason is our only reliable way of doing this (p. 39).  This role for reason is compatible, Sen points out, with recognizing the dangers of ‘overselling reason,’ or in being overconfident in the conclusions of our own reasoning.  Sen also makes the point that our emotions pose no threat to, and should not be understood as hostile towards, our capacity for reason, despite the fact that historically many Enlightenment thinkers may have ignored or downplayed the cognitive role of the emotions (here Sen mentions, unsurprisingly, Smith and Hume as important exceptions).  Nonetheless, “the need for reasoned scrutiny of psychological attitudes does not disappear even after the power of emotions is recognized” (p. 50).  These general claims all strike me as correct and not especially controversial.

Sen also sketches some of the main elements of his account of ‘ethical objectivity’ in this chapter.  One element is Adam Smith’s device of the ‘impartial spectator.’  Another is Rawlsian public reason.  Public reason provides a ‘public framework of thought’ by means of which arguments can be made in a transparent and mutually justifiable way.  Despite the differences amongst the different accounts of ethical objectivity mentioned in this chapter, Sen notes that “there is an essential similarity in their respective approaches to objectivity to the extent that objectivity is linked…by each of them to the ability to survive challenges from informed scrutiny coming from diverse quarters.”  Despite appropriating Rawlsian public reason to his account of ethical objectivity, though, Sen asserts that “the principles that survive such scrutiny need not be a unique set,” (p.45) and that this marks a significant difference between his position and Rawls’s.  (I don’t think that this is a fair interpretation of Rawls’s position in his later writings, but will postpone this discussion until next week.)

One potentially controversial claim is Sen’s assertion that Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective approaches to public justification ultimately do not differ much.  “If people are capable of being reasonable in taking note of other people’s points of view and in welcoming information,” Sen writes, “then the gap between the two approaches would tend to be not necessarily momentous” (p. 43).  I think that Sen is correct here (at least I think I do – I found his discussion in this section at times to be somewhat opaque), but then I haven’t read Habermas in years.  I’d be curious to know what anyone better informed of Habermas’s criticisms of Rawls thinks.

Sen makes another comment that some readers of a Kantian persuasion might find debateable.  He states: “Since reasoned support can hardly be in itself a value-giving quality, we have to ask: why, precisely, is reasoned support so critical?” (Pp. 39-40.)  I suspect that some Kantians (especially those influenced by Korsgaard’s interpretation of Kant’s theory of value) would disagree.  (Although the comment by Sen is so brief, perhaps I am reading too much into it?)

I found Sen’s comment on Rawls’s idea of ‘reasonable persons’ on the bottom of page 43 somewhat puzzling.  After noting his overall sympathy with the idea of Rawlsian public reason, he writes: “I will not make a big distinction between those whom Rawls categorizes as ‘reasonable persons’ and other human beings… I have tried to argue elsewhere that, by and large, all of us are capable of being reasonable” (p. 43).  He then goes on to remark that his own view is instead similar to Rawls’s idea of ‘free and equal citizens,’ according to which all persons have ‘two moral powers’ (a capacity for a sense of justice, and a capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good).

Sen does not seem to appreciate that Rawls’s idea of ‘reasonable persons’ is a very specific one in political liberalism, and one related directly to the idea of citizens as ‘free and equal.’  The first feature of reasonable persons is that they acknowledge the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ (i.e., they manifest a “willingness to recognize the burdens of judgement and to accept their consequences for the use of public reason in directing the legitimate exercise of political power” [PL, p. 54]).  The second feature of reasonable persons is that they hold the ‘criterion of reciprocity’ to be a prescriptive norm for the public political relations of citizens (“reasonable persons are ready to propose, or to acknowledge when proposed by others, the principles needed to specify what can be seen by all as fair terms of cooperation” [JaF, pp. 6-7]).  Finally, reasonable persons honour these principles, even at some cost to their own interests.  These features of reasonable persons correspond to citizens’ capacity for a sense of justice, just as the rationality of persons corresponds to citizens’ capacity for a conception of the good.  So the idea of ‘free and equal citizens’ with ‘two moral powers’ is not wholly distinct from the idea of persons understood as ‘rational and reasonable’ in Rawlsian political liberalism.  Moreover, I see nothing in Rawls’s conception of ‘reasonable persons’ that rules out the possibility that ‘all of us’ are capable of being ‘reasonable’ in the relevant sense.

This is obviously a relatively minor criticism.  However, I think that Sen’s comments here are indicative of a problem that becomes more marked in the next chapter, namely, an apparent failure on the part of Sen to address adequately key features of Rawlsian political liberalism.  This problem is well illustrated, I think, by the very label ‘transcendental institutionalism.’  I’ll have more to say about this next week.

Hi All,
This is the first post to kick off the reading group on Sen’s new book The Idea of Justice. I want to thank Blain for organizing this and I look forward to participating in it.

I have to admit it is with much anticipation that I begin to read Sen’s book. A few years ago I heard him give this talk which outlined the basics of the arguments he advances in the book. His project struck me as one that I (as a critic of ideal theory) would be very sympathetic with and I hope this book can helpfully advance the methodological debates the discipline is now engaged in. So I have high hopes for this book and look forward to reading it together with the group.

OK, so down to the business at hand. Keeping Blain’s advice about word count (I’m a bit over, sorry!) in mind, I thought I would begin by drawing attention to a crucial passage in the Preface, and then link that with a few of the central issues that follow in the Introduction itself (issues which will, I suspect, play an important role in the overall argument of the book).

In the Preface Sen explicitly states that the theory of justice he seeks to advance “aims to clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice” (ix).

The issue of what we want a theory of justice to deliver is arguably one of the most interesting, and hotly debated, topics in the field today. Some obvious examples that immediately come to my mind are David Schmidtz’s analogy between theories and maps in The Elements of Justice, Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of luck egalitarianism, and G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality where he distinguishes principles of regulation from principles of justice and maintains that the latter are “fact-free”.

The contrast between Cohen’s position and Sen’s is very stark and worth considering. The vision of political philosophy Sen is invoking, at least in this early chapter of The Idea of Justice, is one primarily concerned with the question “How should be done?”. Whereas for Cohen the primary concern of the philosopher is: “what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference”. I myself come down on the side of Sen on this issue. Those partial to Cohen’s approach might maintain that we ought to privilege deliberating about perfect justice for it is only once we comprehend the ideal that we can properly undertake the practical task of trying to realize justice in the “real world”. Sen notes that he will address this kind of challenge in Chapter 4, so I look forward to seeing how he addresses that concern.

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I just wanted to announce the publication of my book with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty.

It’s something of an unusual book for philosophers, because it’s as much a genuine history (and economics, psychology, law, and sociology) book as it is a philosophy book. I’d summarize our motivation for the project as follows: Dave and I note that historically, philosophers and regular people have used the word “liberty” to refer to a wide range of related things. When philosophers debate what the word “liberty” refers to, or which kind of liberty is most important, they often have a background assumption that liberty, whatever that is, is to be promoted by government in a particular way. But that’s not a good assumption. What role government, or any institution, ought to play in promoting a particular kind of liberty is determined not by conceptual analysis, but by investigating (empirically) what government and other institutions are likely to accomplish. What value any kind of liberty has is also for the most part contingent—we need to see what having certain kinds of liberties does to people, and what happens to people when those liberties are absent. Again, this goes beyond philosophy and requires empirical work. Also, what relationship different kinds of liberty with one another requires empirical work. For instance, while people might debate whether negative or positive liberty is more important, we instead note that empirically, it looks like protecting negative liberty has a long and non-accidental historical track record of promoting positive liberty.

Here’s the table of contents:

Introduction: Conceptions of Freedom.

1. A Prehistory of Liberty: Forty Thousand Years Ago.

2. The Rule of Law: AD 1075.

3. Religious Freedom: 1517.

4. Freedom of Commerce: 1776.

5. Civil Liberty: 1954.

6. Psychological Freedom, the Last Frontier: 1963.

Speaking of non-ideal theory (or ideal theory in less than ideal contexts)… I am curious to hear whether my fellow public reasoners believe that the recent US Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance should have any impact on our work as political philosophers.  To be clear, I don’t mean to start a debate over whether or not the Supreme Court ruled correctly, or whether campaign donations are speech, or even whether corporations are people who have rights like you and me (though I do have opinions on such matters).  Instead, I want to consider whether the American legal landscape should guide our work on theories justice or democracy.

Here’s what I have in mind. Liberal political thought, to this point, has largely ignored a set of concerns that were central to many Labor movements, which might be called concerns over “workplace democracy” or what is sometimes called “democratic corporatism.”  With some notable exceptions (Pateman, Gould, Mansbridge), frequently offered by those operating in a Marxist framework, political philosophers have instead focused on issues of distribution or issues of legitimacy in terms of public reasons or political dialogue.  Relatively little attention has been paid to whether a society with profound inequalities in wealth, where corporations are dominant players in the political landscape, can be meaningfully democratic. There are a number of reasons for this omission, I think, including the assumptions that (1) if distribution problems are taken care of the rest will take care of itself or (2) the ideal society will have stringent campaign finance laws, public election financing, or some other way of insulating the political sphere from the economic sphere.  Given the economic and, following the Supreme Court Ruling, political-legal realities in the US for the indefinite future, I no longer believe that such assumptions will do.

Instead, I believe that if corporations are going to be dominant players in the political landscape for the indefnite future, more work needs to be done to consider whether such organizations need to be more democratic.  Are CEOs or Boards of Directors the “free speakers” for corporations, at liberty to use corporate money to influence election outcomes and policy debates?  Do campaign contributions require the approval of the majority of shareholders?  Do they require the approval of employees? There are of course reasons to favor discretionary decision making by executives - taking a vote for all decisions may leave firms unable to respond efficiently to market demands. Nonetheless, there are also substantial reasons to provide protections for workers or stockholders from what may be arbitrary or self-servingly indefensible decisions made by a board of directors. Also, the need for such rapid, discretionary decision-making with regard to political contributions is far from clear.  Treating corporations, in theory or in practice, as individuals with a right to free speech completely ignores these issues.

Later in his career Rawls himself more clearly distinguishes a property-owning democracy from the idea of a welfare state. A recent symposium in the Journal of Social Philosophy considers the implications of this distinction, in a way that is frequently relevant to the issue at hand. Given Citizens v. FEC, however, I believe that more work on the moral and political implications of corporate involvement in contemporary politics, and the ways in which workplace democracy can further democratic equality without unduly sacrificing market competitiveness, is necessary.  It is no longer plausible (if it ever was) in the American context, to believe that campaign finance law will insulate the political sphere from the economic sphere, such that inequalities in one need not entail inequalities in the other.

Any thoughts?

Many of you have probably seen Simmons’ article just out in PPA on ideal and non-ideal theory. Simmons defends Rawls’ account of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and his paper is a must read. That said, I have been ruminating over a slightly different take on the debate over the nature of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and so thought I’d throw an idea out there.

Drawing on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice many have suggested that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is akin to the full/partial compliance distinction. In creating his ideal theory, Rawls assumes that people will comply (almost) perfectly with the requirements of justice. He then uses his original position argument to conclude that his first principle of justice should have priority over his second. Next, Rawls weakens his ideal theory assumptions, adding the constraint that people may not abide by the requirements of justice. He concludes that we should only embrace his general conception of justice in non-ideal theory.

Unfortunately, the canonical examples of ideal and non-ideal theories cannot be fully characterized as full and partial compliance theories respectively. As Simmons and others note, even Rawls says ideal theory requires more than perfect compliance. In creating his ideal theory he assumes, for instance, that the circumstances do not prevent justice from being secured. Furthermore, others have more recently provided ideal and non-ideal theories that are not full and partial compliance theories (respectively). The main thing that distinguishes Allen Buchanan’s and Michael Blake’s non-ideal theories from their ideal theories, for instance, is that their non-ideal theories assume that there will be states and consider what we should do given that we are confined to a statist system. Similarly, the main thing that distinguishes Ronald Dworkin’s non-ideal theory from his ideal theory is that he assumes that people only have different talents and disabilities in his ideal theory. Blake’s, Buchanan’s, and Dworkin’s ideal theories do not require perfect compliance. Assuming that there is something to the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and these authors are not just using the terms in completely different ways, the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction cannot just be the full/partial compliance distinction.

Reflecting on the many ways people seem to use the terms, one might despair at the thought of trying to unify such disparate ideal and non-ideal theories. In the draft of his book manuscript Michael Blake suggests, for instance, that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is not that useful because it can mean many different things. He implores others to be careful to explain just what assumptions they are making in advancing any theory. Perhaps this is part of what drives Simmons and others to argue for one or another of these ways of thinking about the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction.

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According to the BBC, in the latest twist in l’affaire du foulard/voile, a French parliamentary committee has recommended a ban on women wearing Islamic face veils in public [Correction: the proposal applies to public facilities, such as hospitals and mass transit, and not walking about the street]. The reasoning behind the report seems to be that face veils are contrary to the values of the republic, as symbols of women’s repression and extremist fundamentalism.

The proposal strikes me as a very bad idea in a number of ways. I don’t see how the law liberates women from whatever social pressure there exists to wear a veil. Will wearing a balaclava in public be illegal too? If not, then won’t the law just force a change of attire? Nussbaum has some discussion of this general issue in her Liberty of Conscience, pp. 346-53, invoking the ability of Chicagoans (and the Dutch, and presumably the French) to conduct normal social interactions with their faces covered in winter.

What if feminists who believe that make-up is just a manifestation of the objectification of women in patriarchy, and hence symbolic of repression and degradation, are right? Is there a way to support the veil ban, but not think that this claim about make-up would justify a make-up ban?* How about t-shirts with sexist imagery and messages? Quite apart from dress codes, we can recognise prostitution as degrading, and hence contrary to the values of an egalitarian republic, without thinking it should be illegal, primarily because making it illegal may very well just make the lives of those women, so degraded, even worse.

So, a question: can anything be said in support of this proposal (from ideally a feminist perspective), that does not run into these and other problems?

*[I should add I think having to wear a burqa is worse than feeling compelled to wear make-up.]

So, another query: Should the US defend Google?  Why or why not?US to protest formally to China over Google ‘attacks’

Dear all,

I post here in pdf format a paper of mine in which I argue, well, that Rawls’s theory of justice implies the justification of slavery and genocide and is therefore an abysmal failure as far as reflective equilibrium is concerned. Comments are highly welcome

All the best, Uwe  Unsavory Implications of A Theory of Justice and The Law of Peoples

A question: do people think international humanitarian intervention (or any international intervention, for that matter; perhaps even any intervention at all) has to be coercive?  That is, as a conceptual issue, is intervention necessarily coercive?

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Personality types as elements of the anthroposystem

The anthroposystem and the social system are two aspects of the same developed human society. Both of them represent humankind as a single whole and both of them are organized and structured. But their structural and organizational elements, and consequently the objects of their attention, are different. The social system’s constructive elements are social institutions, each performing their specific functions of maintaining and regulating economic, political, legal, moral and other relations. The anthroposystem’s “cells”, the “points of references”, are informal social-psychological groups of personality types. The anthroposystem and social system are closely tangled, so these two systems influence each other, but at the same time they still remain relatively independent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 1:

Preface

Creation of the concept of the social system

The social system in Marxist philosophy

Post-Marxist concepts of the social systems

Testing the social system theories

Into the fabric of social institutes

The basic personality types

Psychopath (sociopath)

Authoritarian personality

Machiavellian personality

“Technocratic”, “practical” or “hoarding” personality

Amiable, friendly or agreeable personality

Altruistic personality

Creative personality

Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Preface

It has always made me feel uneasy reading or hearing someone trying to explain people’s inhumane acts, and even brutish violence, by recourse to the concept of “human nature”. On this explanation, there are really only two possibilities: either one is a criminal (or at least a potential criminal) or one is simply not a human being. At the same time, I still find it bewildering that our primeval ancestors, the illiterate people of the stone and bronze ages (and our contemporaries, the Aborigines of Australia and the Americas), while poorly versed in the theory of nature’s laws, knew and expressed in their everyday lives closer kinship with nature than do even the most educated of us today. Their attitude to each and every part of nature was more humane and respectful than that of the majority of our contemporaries, despite the fact that these people burned trees for fire and killed animals for food. So what has happened to modern people, to society? Does civilization, indeed, spoil us? Why have we been breaking our contracts or mutual understanding with the animate natural world? What has been pitting us against each other and why do we degrade and eliminate other people? Is it true that mankind is a malignant tumor of the body that is earth? Are we, human beings, indeed evil from our very childhood? And who and what exactly are ‘we’?

These are the questions that the following discussion is concerned with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Levy has put up a link to the podcasts from the recent memorial colloquium on Jerry Cohen’s life and work organised by the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique at Montreal. The presentations are from Daniel Weinstock, William Clare Roberts, Joseph Carens, Jurgen De Wispelaere, and Jacob Levy.

PBS‘ Frontline this week aired an interesting episode on the credit card industry, which began with a discussion of some of the controversial practices initiated by Providian and soon adopted by the bulk of its competitors. I think the episode raises some interesting philosophical questions about the nature and moral force (to borrow Alan Wertheimer’s term) of exploitation.

For instance, one of the practices Providian is said to have developed involved substituting what they called “stealth pricing” for explicit annual fees. Instead of charging all its customers a flat fee of, say, $50 per year, Providian offered cards with zero annual fee but with steep penalties for late payments, going over your credit limit, etc. To many customers, Providian’s cards thus appeared to be free. But Providian knew that many of its customers - especially the low-income, high credit-risk customers it was targeting - would wind up paying much more in penalties than they would have with a flat annual fee, even if most customers (wrongly) believed the opposite to be true.

So, at least at first glance, it looks like Providian was exploiting several kinds of vulnerability on the part of these customers.  First, the customers were vulnerable insofar as they were likely to do the things that would incur penalties. And secondly, they were vulnerable insofar as they tended to underestimate the extent to which they would do this, and hence underestimate the true cost of the cards Providian was offering. Providian took advantage of these vulnerabilities to enhance its own profit (which, at its peak according to the documentary, were around $1 billion per year).

Is this a case of wrongful exploitation? It might be, but the story raises a few questions in my mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

Continuum Ethics
A series of books exploring key topics in contemporary ethics and moral philosophy.

Continuum Ethics presents a series of books that will bridge the gap between new research work and undergraduate textbooks. They will provide close examination of key concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Aimed largely at upper-level undergraduates and research students, they will also appeal to researchers in the field. Authors will be expected to combine philosophical sophistication with an accessible style that can engage the educated reader.
Each volume will introduce its subject within the context of recent developments in moral philosophy. Each book will cover the major thinkers and their key ideas, outline questions raised within the area of concern, and explore possible answers to those questions. Authors will be encouraged to argue for a particular view or views and each volume will present an original contribution to the field. Each book will explore - either throughout the text or in the final chapter(s) - the future of the topic in contemporary ethics and other research areas.

The authors of individual volumes will be experienced teachers of the subject, based in respected departments and will possess a good, accessible written style. Each volume will also feature a brief preface from the series editor.

The series will benefit from a coherent series look, a striking design and effective marketing.
Possible Topics:

Duty
Error Theory
Expressivism
Freedom and Morality
Global Justice
Just War
Moral Knowledge
Moral Motivation
Moral Narrative and Personality
Moral Psychology and Character
Moral Realism
Punishment
Reasons and Rationality
Rights
Utility
Virtue

Anyone interested in contributing to this series should contact the series editors:

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) (t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk)

Simon Kirchin (Kent) (S.T.Kirchin@kent.ac.uk)

Announcing two new book series with Edinburgh University Press:

STUDIES IN GLOBAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

“Global justice and human rights” is perhaps the hottest topic today. Studies in Global Justice and Human Rights is a new book series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series aims to publish groundbreaking work in this increasingly popular field. This series will publish leading monographs and edited collections on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights that will be of broad interest to theorists working in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

Topics of particular importance are democracy, global gender justice, global justice, global poverty, human rights, international environmental justice, and just war theory amongst others. This series aspires to publish the leading work in this area with broad interdisciplinary appeal.

TEXTBOOKS IN GLOBAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

“Global justice and human rights” is perhaps the hottest topic today. Textbooks in Global Justice and Human Rights is a new book series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series aims to publish groundbreaking work in this increasingly popular field. This series will publish leading introductory textbooks on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights that will be of broad interest to both undergraduate and graduate students in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

We are particularly interested in publishing work in the fields of

• global justice
• human rights
• women and global justice
• global justice and global poverty
• international environmental philosophy

This series aspires to publish the leading textbooks in this area with broad interdisciplinary appeal.

Expressions of interest for BOTH series are most welcome and should be directed to the series editor, Thom Brooks (email: t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk).

Edinburgh University Press website: http://www.eupjournals.com/
Global Justice and Human Rights Group: http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/glbljst/Glbjst.aspx

Via an email from CUP:

Columbia University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State.

In this innovative new work Schwarzenbach argues that women have performed the vast majority of often unpaid friendship labor for centuries. Embodying the freedom, equality, and ideals of the Constitution, civic friendship emerges as a necessary condition for genuine justice. Through a critical examination of social and political relationships from ancient times to today, Sibyl Schwarzenbach develops a truly innovative, feminist theory of the democratic state.

You can find out more about the book here.

James P. Sterba at the University of Notre Dame praises the text:
“Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s attempt to show the importance of women’s experiences and feminist theory for the justification of the democratic state is the most successful I have seen. Its achievement should be widely recognized and commented upon by feminist political philosophers and, hopefully, by political philosophers more generally, attracting as much attention as Susan Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family.”

“Rawlsian Liberalism in Context(s)”

Date: February 26-27, 2010
Place:Toyota Auditorium, Baker Center for Public Policy, University of Tennessee

Over a period of fifty years, John Rawls developed and gave voice to the most powerful and systematic moral theory of constitutional liberal democracy since John Stuart Mill’s work a century earlier.  The recent publication of Rawls’s undergraduate thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith,” has encouraged a profitable re-reading of his political philosophy in the context and light of his personal and scholarly engagement with theological ethics and political theology in general and Christianity in particular.  Building on this development, “Rawlsian Liberalism in Context(s)” aims to shed further light on Rawls’s work by situating it within multiple disciplinary contexts.  Symposium speakers will address the relationships between Rawls’s thought and 20th century developments in economics and political economy, in analytic philosophy, in American pragmatist thought, in normative theorizing of American foreign policy and international relations, and in theological ethics and political theology.  Symposium speakers, each an expert on Rawls’s work, include:

• Jerry Gaus, James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona.
• Richard Miller, Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University.
• David Reidy, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Tennessee.
• Robert Talisse, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, Vanderbilt University.
• Paul Weithman, Professor of Philosophy, Notre Dame University.

Sessions are free and open to the public.  Schedule details will be available late fall 2009.  For further information, please contact David Reidy, Philosophy, University of Tennessee, dreidy [at] utk.edu or 865.974.7210.

The symposium is sponsored by the Office of Research, the School of Law, the Baker Center for Public Policy, the departments of Philosophy and Political Science, and the American Studies progam, all at the University of Tennessee.

A quick interruption to let PRers know that my book Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge University Press)  has just come out. Here are few endorsements from the back cover:

‘Talisse sees profound moral and religious conflict in our political life that threatens democracy, and makes impossible effective defenses by appeal to shared values. He advances an important alternative: our common commitment to sound beliefs should lead us all to endorse democratic politics. This is a fine work of public philosophy in the tradition of J. S. Mill and John Dewey.’ –Gerald Gaus, University of Arizona

‘Robert Talisse has provided us with a timely, original, and unapologetic defense of constitutional democracy. It is, he says, the only form of government suited to persons who are already committed in their everyday lives to giving reasons for their beliefs. Artfully blending careful philosophical analysis with contemporary illustrations and accessible prose, Democracy and Moral Conflict makes an authentically democratic and powerfully reasoned case for democracy.’ –John C. P. Goldberg, Harvard University

‘Robert Talisse argues that democracy comes closer than any other political system to instantiating the norms of the folk epistemology which all citizens share. Insofar as we care about the truth, we have a reason to remain committed to democracy, even when the stakes are highest. An engaging read, this book makes an important contribution to the growing discussion of democracy’s epistemic virtues.‘ –David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee

The Stanford political science department, in conjunction with the Ethics in Society Center and other campus programs, is hosting a special event on Friday, October 16 at 4pm.  It is open to the public.

The occasion is the release of a new edited book on the work of our late colleague Susan Moller Okin, Toward a Humanist Justice.

The event will also feature some brief remarks by Kavita Ramdas, the president of the Global Fund for Women, an organization Susan worked with and to which go all proceeds from the sale of the book.

Please feel free to share this invitation with others.

Okin Book Event

Some of you may be familiar with Richard Tuck’s recent book Free Riding. It’s a fascinating and valuable work, but I think much of the central argument, especially about the rationality of voting, is deeply flawed. Anyways, here’s a link to my short critical note on Tuck at JESP: Tuck on the Rationality of Voting: A Critical Note.

Would anyone here would be interested in taking part in a reading group on Amartya Sen’s new book, The Idea of Justice?  If so, I would be interested in starting it up in January 2010.

Meet my neighbors, the Kazans. Stan and his wife Jan live together with their three grown children (one daughter and two sons) who are there until they can afford places of their own. They are a decent family, and they are friendly and cooperative with the rest of the neighborhood, although some of their practices trouble me. Read the rest of this entry »

What do people think about this case?  Should the Dutch have interfered with her and her parents?

Kevin asked me to post these comments which I had hoped would make it onto the Molinari web page a long time ago. They provide a short response to some replies by Jan Narveson and Roderick Long to some comments I made on a symposium at the APA last year. Whew… anyone get that?

Just in case you are confused, here is the run down. The commentary I gave focused on a collection of essays on libertarianism and anarchism edited by Tibor Machan and Roderick Long. In it, I advanced a new argument for the conclusion that libertarians should endorse some kind of welfare liberalism.

Here were the comments I made: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-hassoun08.htm

Several people responded. Here are Narveson’s comments: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-narveson08.htm

Here are Long’s: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-long08.htm

Here are Thomas’s: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-thomas08.htm

Perhaps I should also say that I post my reply to these here only because I did not succeed in getting them on the Molinari web site and there was some discussion of the relevant argument in the commentary I posted here a while ago. This was the commentary: http://publicreason.net/2008/05/23/why-libertarians-should-be-welfare-liberals/

Read the rest of this entry »

An updated (thanks for the comments!) working draft (now with citations/footnotes) of my ”Human Rights and Liberal Toleration” has been posted to SSRN.com. 

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436125

I would be most grateful for additional comments and suggestions (to this site or to me directly).  An earlier and much shorter version was presented at the APA Central this past spring; those who provided helpful comments on that occasion will, hopefully, not be disappointed by this continuation of the effort.

Wishing everyone the best for the remainder of the summer (in the Northern Hemisphere). 

Hello everyone,

The democratic peace is secured not simply (if at all) through explicitly democratic institutions as such, but through a number of social and political norms and institutions commonly associated with democracies. In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls claims that the conditions that secure the peace between democracies can be found in his non-democratic, non-liberal ‘decent’ societies too. I argue that the situation is more complex than Rawls suggests, but that he is still largely correct. Since decent societies pose no special threat to global peace, the democratic peace thesis does not justify efforts to democratize them. This argument is part of Rawls’s larger defense of decent societies.

This paper is being published by Political Studies.  It is available now through their “Early View” and will appear in print soon (57:3, Oct 2009).  A copy is also available at SSRN.

This is part of an ongoing project, so comments are welcome and appreciated.

Ok, if the mathematics discussed in my last post are right, here’s the upshot:

Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (in its original formulation) says that in an election between A and B (where A  is the right choice and B is the bad choice), for an electorate in which each voter has an independent probability p>.5 of voting for A (the right choice), then as the size of electorate increases, the probability that the electorate will elect A (the right choice) approaches 1. Even for a low value of p, such as p=.51, the probability that the electorate will choose A approaches 1 rather quickly. For instance, with 10,001 voters, the electorate already has about a 99% chance of picking A.

Some epistemic democrats defend democracy using Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. They claim that democracies are adequately modeled by the Jury Theorem, and that the average voter is more likely than not to make a good choice. There’s debate about whether democracies are well-modeled by the theorem (e.g., whether voters make statistically independent choices, and if they don’t, what impact that has). (E.g., see the chapter “The Irrelevance of the Jury Theorem” in Estlund’s [i]Democratic Authority[/i].) I’m with Jerry Gaus and Estlund–I don’t think actual democracies are adequately modeled by the theorem, so I don’t think that we can use the theorem to conclude that they tend to make good choices. (Nor can we use it to conclude that they tend to make bad choices. Note that if p>.5, then as the size of the electorate increases, the theorem says that voters are certain to choose the bad choice. And I think the evidence, if anything, points to p<.5. So, from my perspective, it’s a good thing Condorcet’s Jury Theorem doesn’t apply.)

;However, suppose you do believe that democracies are well-modeled by the theorem. If so, then it’s worth asking how many voters you really need. After all, the probability that the electorate will make the right choice shoots up near 1 pretty quickly, even when p is only slightly higher than .5. Every additional voter adds some small probability that the electorate will make the right choice. However, we get diminishing returns. The question is how rapidly the returns diminish. After all, in a high stakes election, the net value of A over B might be, let’s say, on the order of $10 trillion.

 Imagine that, just like the other voters, my p is .51. Still, suppose that my vote increases the likelihood that we’d make the right choice by 1% or even .001% Because the value of making the right choice is so high, then my additional vote counts for a lot–it has a lot of expected utility. [The expected utility of my vote in this case is the difference in value between A and B times the marginal increase in the probability that the electorate will make the right choice.] So, for example, the 1001st voter is adding only about .02% accuracy to the electorate, but that means her vote is worth $2 billion! [Note: I have the exact number at work, but I’m typing this at home. So it might a little off.] Think of the electorate as being like a machine making a choice that’s worth $10 trillion or $0. If you increase the likelihood that this machine will make the right choice by .02%, you’re increasing the expected utility of the machine’s choice by $2 billion.

So, at what N is the Nth voter only contributing a few dollars worth of accuracy? Let’s suppose that every voter has an opportunity cost of $100. That is, during the time she votes, she could have done something else worth $100 either to her personally or to promote the common good. At what N does adding additional voters become wasteful?

Now that it seems like I’ve gotten Mathematica to cooperate, it looks like for this example, where each voter has a p of .51, the net value of making the right choice is $10 trillion, and where we’re calling votes wasteful when they have an expected utility under $100, votes become wasteful at about N=100,001. (This isn’t exactly right–it’s just about the order of magnitude where the value of a vote is in the 10s. In fact, I’m calculating the value of 100,001st voter at about $26.) Note that if p is higher than .51, the net value of the right choice is lower, or if opportunity costs are higher, then N will be lower. So, N=100,000 might be a high estimate.

So, if you defend democracy using the standard formulation of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, it seems that you should think having 120 million Americans vote is kind of a waste of time. It would be far better just to have a small number of people vote and have everyone else go about their day. 119,899,999 of these people are just adding unnecessary accuracy to an already impressively accurate machine. They should go do something else instead. We just don’t need mass democracy. It doesn’t do us that much additional good. The first 100 thousand voters contribute more than the next 100 billion. Etc.

Of course, you might say, “Well, if only 100,000 people voted, they might not vote for the common good but for their self-interest at the expense of the common good.” Maybe so. But if you’re saying stuff like that, I take it you don’t think democracies are well-modeled by Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.

All this hangs on my having done the mathematics correctly. So, I’ll double-check the results when I get back to work on Monday.

If the conditions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem hold, then every additional jurist/voter adds some marginal amount of accuracy to the jury as a whole.  However, this jury experiences diminishing marginal returns.  If every juror has a 51% chance of being accurate, then the jury of 101 members has about a 57% chance of being accurate, a jury of 501 members has a 67% chance of being accurate, a jury of 1001 members has a 73% chance of being accurate, a jury of 5001 members has 92% chance of being accurate, and a jury of 10,000 members has a 99.99% chance of being accurate.I’d like to know what the marginal value (in terms of her contribution to accuracy of the jury) of the Nth voter is when N is rather large.

The accuracy of a jury of N members when each juror has  a 51% chance of being accurate is given by the formula below:

Pa (probability the jury is accurate) = SUM [upper bound = N, lower bound = (N=1)/2] (N!/(N-i!)i!) * (.51^i) * (.49^(N-i))

Since that’s likely to be unclear, here’s a link to a nice print out of the formula:http://books.google.com/books?id=CdIOKZWc3oMC&lpg=PP1&dq=public%20choice%20iii&pg=PA129

It’s easy to calculate Pa using Mathematica for values where N < 6500.  After that, Mathematica and other programs can’t handle it. So, what I’d ideally like to do is find some program that can calculate Pa for higher values of N, such as N=50,000, N=500,000, N= 1,000,000, etc.

Alternatively, if there is some way to find the first derivative of this function, that might be helpful as well. Does anyone know how to do this?

What I’d really like to know is what the optimal number of jurors/voters is when the conditions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem obtain.  Even tiny increases in accuracy can have significant value if the value of being accurate is high enough.  So, for example, the marginal value of the 5007th voters is about 0.002%.  But if picking the better candidate is worth, let’s say, $1 trillion dollars, then the expected value of that vote is quite high.  But what’s the marginal impact of the 50,000th vote?  The 100,000th?  The millionth?I’m wondering if you think that democracies are adequately modeled by the Condorcet Jury Theorem (you shouldn’t, by the way), what’s the optimum number of voters?  Let’s say that the net value of being accurate is $1 trillion, and that adding additional voters is suboptimal once the marginal value of a vote goes below $1.  In that case, the optimal number of jurors (N) is given by the formula:1,000,000,000,000 * [Pa(N+1) - Pa(N)] = 1

Alas, despite trying many things over the past week or so, I have no idea how to solve this without a supercomputer.

Another alternative would be to find some upper bound and prove the the actual number is below this (already low) upper bound.  But I’ve been unsuccessful at that.

Yet another alternative is to calculate the real marginal value of votes at a bunch of Ns that Mathematica can handle, then run some regressions to find a function that models the marginal value well, and use that as substitute.  I’ve done that with a few different functions, but the problem is that these functions are of questionable accuracy for high values of N.Any ideas?

Here are some questions I’m thinking about, and I wonder what you think.

Suppose, for the sake or argument, I’ve established that voters have a duty to vote for candidates or policies which they justifiedly believe will promote the common good.  Otherwise, they have a duty to abstain from voting.

Suppose that vote buying and selling are not illegal.  Now, suppose when Alf votes, he only votes for candidates whom he justifiedly believes will serve the common good.   So long as Alf does that, is there anything wrong with him selling his vote?  Is there anything wrong with paying him to vote that way?

In the current draft of The Ethics of Voting, I argue that it’s not wrong.  So long as Alf is justified in voting a particular way for free, then it’s permissible for him to take money to vote that way and it’s permissible to pay him to vote that way.

I’m curious why anyone would think otherwise.  I’ve looked at the literature on vote buying, and I haven’t found any good objections to Alf’s vote selling.  Much of the empirical literature and the a priori public choice models describe vote selling as harmful, but that’s only because they discuss what happens or would happen when people don’t vote to promote the common good.  So while I think these arguments are good arguments for legally prohibiting vote buying, they don’t say much about Alf’s case.  For instance, many (but not all) public choice economists think legal vote selling would lead to rent-seeking, but these arguments assume that voters will vote in self-interested ways rather than abide by a duty to vote for the common good.

Rather than go on about why I think Alf’s case of vote selling is permissible, and rather than discuss some of the objections I consider, I’m just curious why some of you might think Alf would do something wrong in selling his vote.  It may be that I’m overlooking some killer objection.  Thanks!  -J

This post is a continuation of my earlier post from December.

Last week President Obama give this excellent speech to the National Academy of Sciences.  He pledged to invest 3% of GDP for science research (basic and applied research).  He also vowed to improve education in math and science.  This represents the largest investment in scientific research and innovation in American history.  With such a monumental investment being made in science one has to wonder:  what do we (i.e. political philosophers) have to say about all this?  Is such an investment just or unjust? And why?

Surely the National Academy of Sciences are part of the “basic structure” of society and thus an investment of this scale must raise some important questions of justice that we can contribute some insights to.  Do we have some developed ideas about such issues?  Do we equip the students we teach with the tools for thinking rationally and critically about such issues?

Here is an exercise I hope you might entertain trying.  Imagine that a reporter has contacted you about President Obama’s investment in science and innovation.  You are asked, as a political philosopher interested in issues of justice, to offer some comments about this policy.  Please consider using the “comments” section to this post below to add your insights and thoughts.  I think this might be a useful exercise to help stimulate interest in this neglected area of the field. 

Cheers,

Colin   

If you are really struggling to come up with anything to say here are some basic questions to consider to help get the juices flowing:  (1) What is science? (2) what is science for? and (3) how large are the stakes involved between the worst possible science policies a government could implement and the best policies? (and what constitutes the worst and best here?)

Hi everyone,

A graduate student of mine is interested in doing some research on the topic of human rights.  I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good review article that presents the main debates in the contemporary literature on human rights, or a book that does the same.  I am not interested in a book that primarily offers its own distinctive take on the issue.  Rather, I would like something to help this student start to navigate the literature.

Thanks a lot for any ideas.

Victoria

JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY:
An International Journal of Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy
(ISSN 1740-4681)

Volume 6, Number 2 (2009)

ARTICLES

David DeGrazia, ‘Moral Vegetarianism from a Very Broad Basis’, pp. 143-65

Martin Peterson, ‘The Mixed Solution to the Number Problem’, pp. 166-77

Tim W. Christie, ‘Natural Separateness: Why Parfit’s Reductionist Account of Persons Fails to Support Consequentialism’, pp. 178-95

M. J. Mulnix, ‘Harm, Rights, and Liberty: Towards a Non-Normative Reading of Mill’s Liberty Principle’, pp. 196-217

Lee Ward, ‘Locke on Punishment, Property and Moral Knowledge’, pp. 218-44

DISCUSSION

Mark Silcox, ‘Reply to Rosebury’, pp. 245-48

REVIEW ARTICLE

Manuel Vargas, ‘Taking the Highway on Skepticism, Luck, and the Value of Responsibility’, pp. 249-65

BOOK REVIEWS

Hans Fink on The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life by Ingmar Persson, pp. 266-68

Richard Raatzsch on Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry: A Defence of Ethics as Clarification by J. Jeremy Wisnewski, pp. 269-72

BOOKS RECEIVED

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Hi Everyone,

This paper defends the view that a nation is justified in undertaking a defensive war — conceived of in terms of collective personal self-defense — against mitigated aggression. A nation committing mitigated aggression conditionally threatens — rather than imminently threatens — the lives of the citizens and soldiers of the victim nation in that it will employ lethal military force if and only if the victim nation does not submit to the invasion, the purpose of which is only to conquer and rule. What mitigated aggression threatens is a nation’s political sovereignty and cultural integrity, in short, a nation’s common way of life.

I was led to write this paper after reading David Rodin’s award winning book War and Self-Defense (Oxford 2002), where he argues that while mitigated aggression is immoral and against international law, a nation is not justified in responding to this kind of aggression with lethal force, for such force is disproportionate. The right of lethal self-defense doesn’t extend to everything that’s valuable. If a robber threatens to kill you if you don’t hand over your car, or if you don’t allow him to take what he wants from your house (he will let you live if you give him what he wants), it’s not clear that you are permitted to kill him. Killing the robber would be disproportionate.

In this paper I give an account of why a nation’s common way of life, by itself, is sufficiently valuable to defend via lethal force [incidentally, Jeff McMahan (cf. “War as Self-Defense”, Ethics and International Affairs 18, 2004) and Thomas Hurka (cf. “Proportionality in the Morality of War”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, 2005) argue that a nation’s common way of life by itself is insufficiently valuable to lethally defend but that a defensive war against mitigated aggression is nonetheless permissible. McMahan’s article can be accessed here. Hurka’s article can be accessed here]. I start by asking, what exactly, other than our own lives, is sufficiently valuable such that we can lethally defend it? I argue that our “primary” interests, because they are indispensably necessary for our well-being, are worth lethally defending. Following David Archard and Joel Feinberg, I discuss two kinds of primary interests: our central and our welfare interests. Our central interests (e.g. being autonomous) define who and what we are fundamentally and are central to our self-concept. Our welfare interests (e.g. minimal level of income) are necessary for the realization of our more ulterior goals in life, the realization of which is constitutive of our well-being. I then show that our interest in participating in our national community (or common way of life), an interest that mitigated aggression seriously sets back, can be characterized as both a central and welfare interest.

A copy of the paper can be found here.

Colleen Murphy’s comments on the paper can be accessed here.

An audio version of the paper can be found below.

I look forward to receiving any comments you may have!

 

 Why a Defensive War against Mitigated Aggression can be Proportionate: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

An online library of Tanner lectures is up at the University of Utah.

Hello Everyone: My name is Wally Siewert. I am currently based in Santa Barbara California. The paper I would like to discuss with you concerns the European Court of Human Rights and its application of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention allows individuals or groups within a signatory nation to bring before the Commission (a panel of the court’s judges) complaints alleging violations of human rights by the relevant signatory government. In general (though the court’s process has changed over the years) the commission determines whether the court will accept the case and on what basis. They clarify the complaint, the issues involved, and the articles of the Convention implicated via a preliminary finding. Based on this recommendation the court itself will then either deny or take up the complaint, in the latter case requiring the government involved to respond.

The European Court of Human Rights is by far the most effective and best-tested model of a supra-national judiciary. As such, its practices and findings will surely influence similar institutions as they become more globally accepted. One of the central lessons of the court’s history is that decisions often explicitly or implicitly involve a certain “margin of appreciation” which the court grants sovereign governments with respect to administering their own nation. For example, in the “little red schoolbook” case the court granted England the right to determine what kind of material it considered unseemly for school children somewhat independently of the court’s enforcement of the human right to freedom of speech. According to some, allowing such a margin of appreciation is a sensible recognition of diversity, to others it is inappropriately deferential to dated notions of sovereignty. Article 15 of the Convention allows that signatory nations may derogate from their obligations regarding certain (non-fundamental) human rights in times of war or national emergency.

It is my project to explore what role a “margin of appreciation” should play in considering whether a signatory nation has allowably derogated from those rights under Article 15. Should the court allow a measure of discretion to the government in adducing the existence of a national emergency or not? The question addresses an issue right at the cusp between international normative obligations created exclusively by agreement, and international obligations which owe their normative force to some substantive supra-national moral conception of human rights. I will address the issue in two ways. First, we will consider the reasoning and decisions of the court with respect to the two cases which have invoked Article 15. As we will discover, the court’s decisions leave much to be desired regarding clarity in this area. Second, I will consider, with the help of a broad analogy, what might be the appropriate standard from a more conceptual point of view.

I much recommend the movie format of the paper presentation found below. I have included a slide show highlighting important pieces of text as well as images which I hope bring a little life to what can be a dry subject. For those who prefer to read the paper a pdf version may be found here.

I want to heartily thank Basak Cali for the commentary which may be found here.

Below the movie version and an audio only version as well. Enjoy!

 

 Margin of Appreciation: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Margin of Appreciation: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Josh Cohen and Tom Nagel have a piece in the TLS and Times Online on Rawls’s senior thesis on sin and faith. The piece is part of a longer introduction to A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, which also includes Rawls’s 1997 piece, “On My Religion.” I’ve shared the uneasiness felt by some about the posthumous publication of a senior thesis, but from what Cohen and Nagel discuss there are a number of interesting anticipations of ideas later worked out in a secular form in Theory and Political Liberalism, particularly the rejection of teleology and a vivid sense of the arbitrariness of merit.

Also by Cohen, Boston Review have forwarded two recent pieces on libertarianism and on the technology, journalism, and democracy that may be of interest to people.

Hello everyone!

My name is Emanuela Ceva and I’m a political philosopher based at the University of Pavia (Italy). The paper I’d like to discuss with you is an attempt to address (and hopefully provide an answer to) a well-known challenge to proceduralism about justice: if procedural theories of justice were genuinely open-ended, they might lead to controversial outcomes which, by definition, could not be disputed, because they had been produced by a just procedure. On the other hand, if they were committed to ruling out some outcomes by virtue of their inherent qualities, their very procedural nature would be jeopardised.

Those who endorse this position also think that it could be used to declare the implausibility of entirely procedural theories of justice.

As someone who has spent a few years trying to argue that proceduralism is at least a plausible (if not necessary, under certain conditions) alternative to substantivism, I have decided to take up this challenge, and devote this paper to showing that a qualified version of proceduralism may be developed, which is equipped to rebut the critique above.

To this aim, I shall unpack the first horn of the dilemma presented above into a twofold challenge, according to which proceduralism risks (i) fostering an “anything-goes” attitude towards justice and (ii) condemning agents to a “deaf and blind” acceptance of any outcome. In order to refute (i), I shall show that it is possible to construct a version of proceduralism that combines open-endedness with cogent prescriptions on justice. Addressing (ii), I shall concede that, for proceduralists, the outcomes of a just procedure cannot be disputed as unjust. However, this does not imply that a genuine procedural theory of justice may not allow some (admittedly limited, but still significant) space for contesting the substance of outcomes on the ground of values other than justice.

I should mention that I shall not offer an argument here explaining why a theory of justice should go procedural in the first place (a task which I’ve tried to carry out elsewhere - see E. Ceva, ‘Plural Values and Heterogeneous Situations. Considerations on the Scope for a Political Theory of Justice‘, European Journal of Political Theory, vol.6 (3), 2007, pp. 359-375). I shall, rather, focus on a more restricted defence of the plausibility of proceduralism against the dilemma outlined above.

For those who cannot cope with my dodgy accent, the pdf of the paper is available here.

David Lefkowitz’s discussion of the paper may be found here.  I thank David for his thoughtful comments, to which I shall post replies by Monday at the latest.

In the podcast (below), I read the full paper (and have added a brief commentary on the tables) but not the footnotes - which I have kept to a minumun, anyway.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank Simon for setting up this great virtual venue for seminars. I hope you’ll enjoy the paper and I very much look forward to any comments or suggestions on it.

Best, emanuela

 

 Just Procedures with Controversial Outcomes: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Though I’m a political philosopher, Marxism/Socialism is not my area of expertise.  Still, I was surprised when, while teaching an essay by Kai Nielsen the other day, I discovered that I really don’t know what a means of production is supposed to be.

The claim that the means of production ought to be owned publicly, rather than privately, seems to be one of if not the defining characteristics of socialism.  So it seems pretty important to be clear on what it refers to.

On the most natural reading, a “means of production” would be anything that’s used to produce.  But that seems very, very broad.  Sure, factories are means of production, but so are muffin trays.  So is my brain, and my muscles.

Do socialists hold that even these things should be publicly owned?  Does it depend on how we use them?  Nielsen says that a socialist will allow for personal private property - and muffin trays seem about as personal as one could get.  Does this mean that we’re allowed to bake muffins for ourselves?  For our neighbors?  For our neighbors in exchange for wine?

How, in other words, does a socialist (Marxist or otherwise) demarcate legitimate personal property from means of production?  Or can the two be reconciled in a principled way?  If public ownership of the means of production can be reconciled with private personal property, can it also be reconciled with some notion of self-ownership?