Freedom, liberalism, and republicanism
Collectivizing Public Reason – Social Theory and Practice
Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members.
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Eliminating Terms of Confusion: Resolving the Liberal–Republican Dispute – Journal of Ethics
John Rawls thinks republicanism is compatible with his political liberalism. Philip Pettit insists that the two conflict in important ways. In this paper, I make sense of this dispute by employing David Chalmers’s (2011) method of elimination to reveal the meaning underlying key terms in Rawls’s political liberalism and Pettit’s republicanism. This procedure of disambiguating terms will show how the two theories defend the same institutional arrangement on the same grounds. The procedure thus vindicates Rawls’s view of the two theories being compatible. The reason for this compatibility is that both theories are politicized—that is, they are constructed to attract the compliance of all reasonable members of a modern, pluralistic society.
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Freedom and Its Unavoidable Trade-Off – Analytic Philosophy
In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticised for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off.
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Republican Freedom and Liberal Neutrality – Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy
Institutions promoting republican freedom as non-domination are commonly believed to differ significantly from institutions promoting negative freedom as non-interference. Philip Pettit, the most prominent contemporary defender of this view, also maintains that these republican institutions are neutral between the different conceptions of the good that characterise a modern society. This paper shows why these two views are incompatible. By analysing the institutional requirements Pettit takes as constitutive of republican freedom, I show how they also promote negative freedom by reducing overall interference. To avoid this result, republican institutions must be more restrictive and require that citizens conform to a life of political engagement. But then republican freedom will not be a neutral ideal. Rejecting negative freedom therefore means sacrificing neutrality.
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Republicanism and Moralised Freedom – Politics, Philosophy & Economics
A moralised conception of freedom is based on a normative theory. Understanding it therefore requires an analysis of this theory. In this paper, I show how republican freedom as non-domination is moralised, and why analysing this concept therefore involves identifying the basic components of the republican theory of justice. One of these components is the non-moralised pure negative conception of freedom as non-interference. Republicans therefore cannot keep insisting that their freedom concept conflicts with, and is superior to, this more basic concept. I demonstrate how we can use pure negative freedom to formulate the republican theory more precisely. This exercise is more fruitful than the common focus on the alleged conflict between the two freedom concepts.
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Republicanism as Critique of Liberalism – Southern Journal of Philosophy
The revival of republicanism was meant to challenge the hegemony of liberalism in contemporary political theory on the grounds that liberals show insufficient concern with institutional protection against political misrule. This paper challenges this view by showing how neo-republicanism, particularly on Philip Pettit’s formulation, demands no greater institutional protection than does political liberalism. By identifying neutrality between conceptions of the good as the constraint on institutional requirements that forces neo-republicanism into the liberal framework, the paper shows that neutrality is what neo-republicans must jettison to provide a tenable critique of liberalism. Only then can neo-republicans ensure a greater protection against misrule by demanding that citizens participate more actively in politics. They can then also criticize liberalism for failing to appreciate the importance of such protection.
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Group agency
Against Corporate Responsibility – Journal of Social Philosophy
Can a group be morally responsible instead of, or in addition to, its members? An influential defence of corporate responsibility is based on results in social choice theory suggesting that a group can form and act on attitudes held by few, or even none, of its members. The members therefore cannot be (fully) responsible for the group’s behaviour; the group itself, as a corporate agent, must be responsible. In this paper, I reject this view of corporate responsibility by showing how it pays insufficient attention to individual agency. By accounting for group members’ strategic behaviour, we shall see how they control collective attitude formation and are therefore responsible for their group’s behaviour.
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Collective Agency and Positive Political Theory – Journal of Theoretical Politics
Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision makers (Riker 1982; Shepsle 1992). This view contrasts with List and Pettit’s (2011) view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how we fail to appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I therefore conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents.
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Eliminating Group Agency – Economics and Philosophy
Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents.
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Groups as Fictional Agents – Inquiry
Can groups really be agents or is group agency just a fiction? Christian List and Philip Pettit argue influentially for group-agent realism by showing how certain groups form and act on attitudes in ways they take to be unexplainable at the level of the individual agents constituting them. Group agency is therefore considered not a fiction or a metaphor but a reality we must account for in explanations of certain social phenomena. In this paper, I challenge this defence of group-agent realism by showing how it is undermined by individual-level analysis of how individuals interact within groups. While group agency can be a useful fiction, real agents are at the individual level, not the collective level.
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Redundant Group Agency – Philosophy of the Social Sciences
According to group-agent realism, treating groups as agents with their own intentional states, irreducible to those of the group members, helps us explain and predict the groups’ behavior. This paper challenges this view. When groups judge logically interconnected propositions, group members often have incentives to misrepresent their beliefs of propositions they care less about in order to increase the probability of their groups adopting their view of propositions they consider more important. Aggregating such untruthful judgments may lead to the group forming false beliefs. Treating groups as agents will then not help us explain or predict their behavior.
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Ideal theory and methodology
How Do You Like Your Justice, Bent or Unbent? – Moral Philosophy and Politics (special issue on Estlund's Utopophobia)
Principles of justice, David Estlund argues, cannot be falsified by people’s unwillingness to satisfy them. In his Utopophobia, Estlundrejects the view that justice must bend to human motivation to deliver practical implications for how institutions ought to function. In this paper, I argue that a substantive argument against such bending of justice principles must challenge the reasons for making these principles sensitive to motivational limitations. Estlund, however, provides no such challenge. His dispute with benders of justice is therefore a verbal one over the true meaning of justice, which need not worry those with the intuition that justice should perform a function that requires bending. By focusing on John Rawls’s reasons for bending his justice principles, I point towards a substantive critique of bent justice.
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Ideal Theory and Its Fairness Role – Journal of Value Inquiry
The debate on ideal theory focuses mainly on whether it can provide a long-term target and a metric for assessing the justice of different institutional arrangements in non-ideal theory. Both critics and defenders of ideal theory typically overlook the role it plays in a model of fairness that can restrict the range of permissible arrangements under non-ideal conditions. In this paper, I explain ideal theory’s fairness role and its part in ensuring an institutional structure that benefits everyone in a society. Critics of ideal theory therefore cannot reject it as simply useless. But I consider how they can question the attractiveness of an ideal-theory-based fairness constraint on non-ideal theory.
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Making Sense of Full Compliance – Social Theory and Practice
The full compliance assumption has been the focus of much recent criticism of ideal theory. Making this assumption, critics argue, is to ignore the important issue of how to actually make individuals compliant. In this paper, I show why this criticism is misguided by identifying the key role full compliance plays in modelling fairness. But I then redirect the criticism by showing how it becomes appropriate when Rawls and other ideal theorists expect their model of fairness to guide real-world political practice. Attempts to establish institutions conforming to this ideal could have undesirable consequences and might even undermine fairness itself.
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Three Roles of Ideal Theory – Ethics, Politics & Society (invited for special issue on Rawls)
Rawlsian ideal theory is meant to perform various roles in non-ideal theory. In this paper, I distinguish between three roles, and I consider the extent to which we can expect ideal theory to perform them. It is meant to serve as a target to guide non-ideal theorising in the long-term. It is also supposed to provide a way of comparing different injustices to tell us which is worst and therefore in most urgent need of a remedy. Finally, ideal theory is the basis for a model of fairness that restricts the set of morally permissible measures in non-ideal theory. I show how the first two roles—the target and urgency roles—are less plausible than the fairness role.
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Political psychology
The Personality of a Personality Cult? Personality Characteristics of Donald Trump's Most Loyal Supporters – Political Psychology (with Ben Goldsmith)
The unusually loyal supporters of Donald Trump are often described as a cult. How can we understand this extreme phenomenon in U.S. politics? We develop theoretical expectations and use the Big Five personality dimensions to investigate whether Trump’s most loyal supporters share personality characteristics that might make them inclined to cult-like support. We find that (1) Trump’s supporters share high levels of Conscientiousness, (2) this is substantively and statistically distinguishable from the commonly identified association between Conscientiousness and Conservatism, and (3) the association is highly robust to a range of sensitivity tests. Our main findings are robust across two surveys. Study 1 is an online survey conducted in 2021 designed specifically for this project. Study 2 is the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES).
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