My aim in this chapter is to push back against the tendency to emphasize Mill’s break from Bentham rather than his debt to him. Mill made important advances on Bentham’s views, but I believe there remains a shared core to their thinking—over and above their commitment to the principle of utility itself—that has been underappreciated. Essentially, I believe that the structure of Mill’s utilitarian thought owes a great debt to Bentham even if he filled in that structure with a richer (...) conception of human nature and developed it in more liberal directions. This commonality is revealed, in particular, in Mill’s own institutional designs and practical reform proposals in Considerations on Representative Government and related writings. If this is right, then the tendency of interpreters to highlight their differences rather than their similarities has been to the detriment of both Mill and Bentham scholarship, and so to our understanding of the rise of liberal utilitarianism. (shrink)

În acest capitol prezint neutralismul liberal urmând, în esență, patru pași. Încep cu definirea neutralismului și cu unele precizări și explicații importante pentru înțelegerea adecvată a susținerii lui fundamentale. Al doilea pas este dedicat evidențierii și explicării celor mai importante argumente neutraliste. Mă concentrez apoi asupra caracterizării principalelor versiuni ale acestei teorii politice și a reliefării argumentelor pe baza cărora se legitimează ele. În sfârșit, într-un ultim pas, expun obiecțiile sau argumentele anti-neutraliste și – totodată – replicile neutraliștilor liberali la (...) ele. Și de această dată este vorba, trebuie să precizez, doar despre obiecțiile cele mai importante (și mai „rezonabile”), nu despre toate obiecțiile, mai mult sau mai puțin plauzibile, care au fost aduse neutralismului de criticii săi. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask three questions of the liberal. In each, I fill in philosophical detail around a certain sort of complaint raised in current public debates about their position. In the first, I probe the limits of the liberal's tolerance for civil disobedience; in the second, I ask how the liberal can adjudicate the most divisive moral disputes of the age; and, in the third, I suggest the liberal faces a problem when there is substantial disagreement about the (...) boundaries of the rational and the reasonable. (shrink)

This paper investigates the ethics of regarding others as epistemically hopeless. To regard a person as epistemically hopeless with respect to p is, roughly, to regard her as unable to see the truth of p through rational means. Regarding a person as epistemically hopeless is a stance that has surprising and nuanced moral implications. It can be a sign of respect, and it can also be a way of giving up on someone. Whether it is morally problematic to take up (...) this stance, I argue, depends on the choices that one faces (or is likely to face). I close the paper by arguing against the view that there are standing moral reasons against regarding others as epistemically hopeless. (shrink)

A leading classical utilitarian, John Stuart Mill is an unlikely contributor to the public reason tradition in political philosophy. To hold that social rules or political institutions are justified by their contribution to overall happiness is to deny that they are justified by their being the object of consensus or convergence among all those holding qualified moral or political viewpoints. In this chapter, I explore the surprising ways in which Mill nevertheless works to accommodate the problems and insights of the (...) public reason tradition, and the extent to which he makes arguments that can help those working within that tradition. Mill’s utilitarian theory incorporates the claim that the demands of social life require a publicly accepted set of normative expectations to govern judgments about when one has met one’s obligations and, relatedly, about the appropriateness of blame or punishment. (shrink)

Explains the concept and conceptions of public justification found in the philosophy and political theory literatures.

Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions. It is normally advocated as a theory of justice in the sense of the duties that we owe each other. So understood, it is silent about any impersonal duties (i.e., duties owed to no one) that we may have.

This is a comprehensive anthology of works concerning the nature of economics as a science, including classic texts and essays exploring specific branches and schools of economics. Apart from the classics, most of the selections in the third edition are new, as are the introduction and bibliography. No other anthology spans the whole field and offers a comprehensive introduction to questions about economic methodology.

The conciliationist and steadfast approaches have dominated the conversation in the epistemology of disagreement. In this paper, drawing on Jennifer Lackey’s justificationist approach and the casuistry paradigm in medical ethics, I will develop a more contextual epistemology of political disagreement. On this account, a given political disagreement’s scope, domain, genealogy, and consequence can be helpful for determining whether we should respond to that disagreement at the level of our confidence, beliefs, or with policy. Though some may argue that responding with (...) policy is a practical consideration instead of an epistemic matter, I argue that even policy responses to disagreements have an epistemic dimension to them that we should not ignore. (shrink)

Memory Detection Tests (MDTs) are a general class of psychophysiological tests that can be used to determine whether someone remembers a particular fact or datum. The P300 MDT is a type of MDT that relies on a presumed correlation between the presence of a detectable neural signal (the P300 “brainwave”) in a test subject, and the recognition of those facts in the subject’s mind. As such, the P300 MDT belongs to a class of brain-based forensic technologies which have proved popular (...) and controversial in recent years. With such tests increasingly being proffered for use in the courtroom — to either support or call into question testimony — it would behoove the legal system to have some systematic framework for ensuring that they are used responsibly. In this paper, I defend one such framework for ensuring that this is the case: the legitimacy enhancing test. According to this test, it is appropriate to make use of technologies such as the P300 MDT whenever doing so would (probably) enhance the legitimacy of the trial. I argue that this test addresses tensions between scientific and legal norms of evidence, and exhibits a number of additional virtues including unification, simplicity and flexibility. Although the test is defended by considering the example of the P300 MDT, its significance is much broader than that. If it has the virtues I claim for it, it should provide a general framework for the responsible use of technologies, and the responsible innovation of social epistemic systems. (shrink)

Some theorists—including Elizabeth Anderson, Gerald Gaus, and Amartya Sen—endorse versions of 'public reason' as the appropriate way to justify political decisions while rejecting 'ideal theory'. This chapter proposes that these ideas are not easily separated. The idea of public reason expresses a form of mutual 'civic' respect for citizens. Public reason justifications for political proposals are addressed to citizens who would find acceptable those justifications, and consequently would comply freely with those proposals should they become law. Hence public reasoning involves (...) 'local ideal theorizing': the justification of political proposals includes their consideration and evaluation under conditions of compliance with them by the citizens to whom those justifications are addressed. Local ideal theorizing, moreover, can lead to 'full ideal theorizing', wherein citizens outline and evaluate an amended version of their society’s 'basic structure'. This argument is illustrated by some recent empirical work on inequality within the United States. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to place John Stuart Mill’s distinctive utilitarian political philosophy in the context of the debate about luck, responsibility, and equality. I hope it will reveal the extent to which his utilitarianism provides a helpful framework for synthesizing the competing claims of luck and relational egalitarianism. I attempt to show that when Mill’s distributive justice commitments are not decided by direct appeal to overall happiness, they are guided by three main public principles: an impartiality principle, (...) a sufficiency principle, and a merit principle. The question then becomes how luck and relational considerations figure into his articulation of these public principles. I argue that relational egalitarianism is more fundamental than considerations of luck and responsibility in Mill’s thought, but I also hope to show that any fleshed out picture of Mill’s reform proposals must recognize his condemnation of the role luck plays in determining the distribution of opportunities and outcomes. (shrink)

Many political theorists take the phenomenon of market failure to show that arguments for libertarianism fail in a straightforward way. This chapter explains why the most common form of this objection depends on invalid reasoning, and why a more sophisticated examination of the relevant economics has led most contemporary economists and policy experts to a view that might be called Default Libertarianism, according to which the strong default for public policy—even in response to market failures—should be toward decentralized, pro-individual freedom (...) policies that involve minimal government intervention in markets. Some experts (but by no means all) similarly believe that even in the face of substantial market failures, libertarian policies are generally best all things considered. This shift toward more libertarian policy represents an important change from the middle of the twentieth century. This chapter explains the structure of the arguments that have led to this shift. (shrink)

The paper deals with the methodological clash between idealism and anti-idealism in political philosophy, and highlights its importance for public reason (PR) and public justification (PJ) theorising. Upon reviewing the broader context which harks back to Rawls’s notion of a realistic utopia, we focus on two major recent contributions to the debate in the work of David Estlund (the prototypical utopian) and Gerald Gaus (the cautious anti-utopian). While Estlund presents a powerful case on behalf of ideal theorising, claiming that motivational (...) incapacity and other non-ideal features of “human nature” – the so-called bad facts – do not normally refute the desirability of highly utopian theories of justice, we show that Gaus is correct in stressing the importance of feasibility considerations, including empirical knowledge about human societies. Because moral disagreement is to be expected even among cognitively and morally excellent reasoners, we argue that Estlund’s search for Truth about justice must idealise away normative diversity as just another bad fact. This methodological dispute has important ramifications for current debates about PR and PJ as the grounds of liberal legitimacy. Because consensual approaches rely on strong idealisation which results in exclusion of numerous comprehensive doctrines from consideration, we conclude that convergence-based liberal political theory has distinct advantage as regards exploiting normative diversity to the advantage of everyone. (shrink)

I argue that both major approaches to public reason liberalism include duties of restraint for legislators. Consensus views require exclusion of non-public reasons, and convergence requires proposal restraint. Violations of these duties create due diligence duties of moral repair, which require the wrongdoer to make a genuine and reasonable effort to normalize moral relations with those wronged. I argue that apology is one favorable route for moral repair. However, it is difficult to assess the sincerity of apologies, so they often (...) need supplemented with other morally compensatory actions. I defend the view that, on consensus accounts, legislators must provide a renewed defense of their positions in terms of public reasons, and, on convergence accounts, legislators must retract their support for positions that violate convergent restraint. (shrink)

The paper critically discusses the dualism in the interpretation of the moral basis of public reason. We argue that in order to maintain the complementarity of both liberal and democratic values within the debate on public reason, the arguments from liberty and from civic friendship cannot be considered in isolation. With regard to the argument from liberty, we contend that because the idea of natural liberty is an indispensable starting point of liberal theory, no explanation of the justification of political (...) power can do without it. In particular, we focus on the requirement of reasonableness and show that we should retain the epistemic aspect of the reasonableness of persons. The main reason for this is to be found in the criterion of reciprocity which provides the deepest justification of the respect for people’s liberty – that is, the liberal aspect of liberal democracy. At the same time, however, we argue that reciprocity also provides the grounds for responding to the criticism that the essentially liberal approach fails to adequately take into consideration the role of political community. Because reciprocity may also be interpreted as being based on civic friendship, it provides the resources to respond to such criticism. It thus supplies the normative background also for the second, democratic pillar of public reason. We then critically examine the newly emerging approach built predominantly on the argument from civic friendship, arguing that by prioritising the civic friendship interpretation and, at times, tending to completely abandon the liberty-based one, it overlooks the indispensability of liberty-based considerations for the criterion of reciprocity. We conclude that in order to adequately capture the common liberal-democratic basis of public reason, both interpretations of reciprocity must be linked within a comprehensive account. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on what I call the question of exclusion. This question, I argue, is one that poses serious challenges to social contract approaches to justice and political legitimacy. In an intuitive way, the exclusion of some individuals seems to be a corollary of the social contractualist approach, which ascribes justice or legitimacy to a social arrangement insofar as it can be regarded as the product of the (actual – expressed or tacit – or hypothetical) consent of specified parties. (...) Consequently, this approach excludes those whose consent is not required in order to view an arrangement as legitimate or just. Given the enormous and continuing influence of John Rawls’s social contract theory, I take the Rawlsian view as my primary focus, concentrating on the way in which the question of exclusion raises challenges for Rawlsian contractualism. According to Rawls’s theory, those who participate in the hypothetical contract and to whom political power ought to be justifiable are reasonable and rational. They are reasonable in the sense that they understand and are willing to comply with the requirements of justice and they are rational in that they have the capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good. This gives rise to two categories of exclusion. In the first part of the thesis, I examine the exclusion of those who will develop the two moral powers sufficiently only if those who are represented in the social contract act (or refrain from acting) in certain ways. This category includes children, foetuses, and unreasonable citizens. Intuitively, justice issues in requirements in at least some of these cases, but it is hard to make sense of this on the Rawlsian approach. In the second part of the thesis, I address the question of exclusion regarding those who will never develop the two moral powers to the requisite degree, such as individuals with severe cognitive disabilities and non-human animals. Again, intuitively, justice issues in requirements here, but their justification is not clear on the contractualist approach. My conclusion is threefold. First, I argue that the problems the question of exclusion poses cannot be addressed by a single solution. Second, I safeguard Rawlsian contractualism by showing how each problem can be resolved. Third, I offer policy-prescriptions on a number of issues, such as education, abortion, and the criminal justice system. (shrink)

Some public reason liberals identify coercive law as the subject matter of public justification, while others claim that the justification of coercion plays no role in motivating public justification requirements. Both of these views are mistaken. I argue that the subject matter of public justification is not coercion or coercive law but political decision-making about the basic institutional structure. At the same time, part of what makes a public justification principle necessary in the first place is the inherent coerciveness of (...) a legally organized basic institutional structure. While most public reason liberals seem to presuppose that the meaning of “coercion” is sufficiently obvious so as not to warrant further analysis, my defense of the essay’s main thesis explicitly draws on an account of coercion as a powerful agent’s employment of enforceable constraints to determine the will of another agent. (shrink)

There is a kind of power no one should have over anyone else, even if they don’t do anything with this power, or even if they only use this power for good. The republican tradition of political philosophy calls this kind of power domination. Here, I develop a theory of domination, and use this theory to advance our understanding of political legitimacy and justification. My account of domination refines recent neo-republican attempts to identify dominating social power with the capacity to (...) interfere arbitrarily with the choices of others. I argue that this capacity is not sufficient for domination. Instead, domination requires that one agent possess “impositional” power over someone else: power enough to make their refusal to cooperate more costly than cooperation across a wide range of forms that cooperation might take. But not all impositional power is domination; impositional power is domination to the extent that those wielding it do so in “deliberative isolation”—in accord only with their own sense of what’s best. The nature of domination, what it takes to minimize it, and its connection to deficits in political values like freedom and equality, are the subject of Chapter 2. The remainder of the dissertation uses the results of that chapter to construct a non-voluntarist alternative to the standard liberal account of how to reconcile political power with freedom and equality. Chapters 3 and 4 show how consent—actual or hypothetical—is not necessary to legitimize political power. What is necessary is that such power enable us to fulfil our duties against dominating others, while remaining accountable to us so that the state does not itself become a source of domination. How duties against domination can legitimize states is the primary subject of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 turns to the question of what we owe our fellow citizens as we cooperate together in the task of holding the state accountable. The answer to this question amounts to a repurposing and reformulation of public reason liberalism. Adviser: Joseph Mendola. (shrink)

This Thesis reconsiders the prospects for an approach to global justice centring on the proposal that every human being should possess a certain bundle of goods, which would include certain members of a distinctive category: the category of capabilities. My overall aim is to present a clarified and well-developed framework, within which such claims can be made. To do this, I visit a number of regions of normative and metanormative theorising. I begin by introducing the motivations for the capability approach, (...) and clarifying some of its most distinctive features. Next, I focus on Martha Nussbaum's version of the approach, and identify several problems therein. The most important concerns epistemology, and especially the challenges that constructivist theories pose. The middle part of the Thesis presents an alternative, based on the work of John McDowell, which I argue has superior prospects. Then, I turn to two further problems: that of making sense of the universalistic aspirations of cosmopolitanism, and that of integrating the microscopic prescriptions of ethics with the macroscopic analyses of political philosophy. Using the Aristotelian interpretation of its core framework that I have developed, I conclude that the capability approach can provide compelling answers to important questions about global justice. (shrink)

In The Order of Public Reason, Gerald Gaus defends an innovative and sophisticated convergence version of public reason liberalism. The crucial concept of his argumentative framework is that of “social morality”, intended as the set of rules apt to organize how individuals can make moral demands over each other. I claim that Gaus’s characterization of social morality and its rules is unstable because it rests on a rejection of the distinction between the normative and the descriptive. I argue that such (...) rejection is motivated by certain practical aims Gaus wishes his theory to achieve. His method and his idea that morality needs to be understood both as the dictate of impartial reasoning and as a social and historical fact come from the need for his theory to perform the task of settling the problem of order. I discuss Gaus’s philosophical attitude and, finally, distinguishing between “therapeutic” and “evaluative” approaches, I present some points of discussion for understanding the role and scope of political philosophy in general. (shrink)

The paper places the work of G. Gaus into the tradition of political thought experimenting. In particular, his strategy of modeling moral decision by the heuristic device of idealized Members of the Public is presented as an iterated thought experiment, which stands in marked contrast with more traditional devices like the veil of ignorance. The consequences are drawn, and issues of utopianism and realism briefly discussed.

We argue that philosophy has an important role to play in bridging certain social practices with certain scientific advancements. Specifically, we describe such a role by focusing on the issue of how and whether neuropsychological data concerning psychopathic offenders reflect on their criminal culpability. We offer some methodological requirements for this type of philosophical application. In addition, we show how it might help in addressing the problem of determining the criminal responsibility of psychopathic offenders.

The article provides a focused overview of the recent debates in political philosophy on the role of religious arguments (as reasons for action) in liberal democracy, as well as a preliminary defence of a particular approach to the issue. Drawing on Christopher Eberle’s typology, we distinguish three main camps – Justificatory Liberalism, basing its advocacy of a “doctrine of religious restraint” on Rawls’s account of public justification; its Liberal Critics, embracing a wholly permissive position vis-à-vis religious arguments in the public (...) sphere; and New Traditionalism, which assigns priority to the religious rationale. The article deals in more detail with the exchange between the first two camps. Upon considering their strengths and weaknesses, we argue for a more robust “third way” between exclusion from and unqualified inclusion of religious arguments in public debates in liberal democracy. Inspired by the work of Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier, we the outline in the closing sections a framework of such “minimal justificatory liberalism” that steers clear of several errors shared by both the defenders and the critics of justificatory liberalism. (shrink)