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. (shrink)

Distributed cognition refers to processes which are (i) cognitive and (ii) distributed across multiple agents or devices rather than performed by a single agent. Distributed cognition has attracted interest in several fields ranging from sociology and law to computer science and the philosophy of science. In this paper, I discuss distributed cognition from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. Drawing on models of judgment aggregation, I address two questions. First, how can we model a group of individuals as a distributed cognitive system? Second, (...) can a group acting as a distributed cognitive system be ‘rational’ and ‘track the truth’ in the outputs it produces? I argue that a group’s performance as a distributed cognitive system depends on its ‘aggregation procedure’ – its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ inputs into collective outputs – and I investigate the properties of an aggregation procedure that matter. (shrink)

Consequentialist and Kantian theories differ over the ethical relevance of consequences of actions. I investigate how they might differ too over the relevance of what actions are consequence of. Focusing on the case of group action and collective responsibility, I argue that there's a kind of analog to the problem of aggregating the value of consequencesthat Kantian theories will not confront and consequentialist theories will. The issue provides a useful way to characterize a deep difference between Kantian and consequentialist theories (...) and points, ironically, toward a way of making those views compatible. (shrink)

Hoy estamos asistiendo a un creciente interés por la retórica argumentativa debido a su estrecha relación con el discurso público. Tienen especial relieve dos puntos a este respecto: 1, la contribución de la retórica a la revisión crítica de los programas en curso de la llamada “democracia deliberativa”; 2, la lectura de la Retórica de Aristóteles en la línea de estos propósitos críticos. Mi artículo se propone desarrollar este segundo punto a través de un examen de la concepción aristotélica de (...) la retórica y de su vindicación de la deliberación pública. (shrink)

Etycy nie poświęcali dotąd wiele uwagi niepewności, koncentrując się często na skrajnie wyidealizowanych hipotetycznych sytuacjach, w których zarówno kwestie empiryczne (np. stan świata, spektrum możliwych decyzji oraz ich konsekwencje, związki przyczynowe między zdarzeniami), jak i normatywne (np. treść norm, skale wartości) były jasno określone i znane podmiotowi. W poniższym artykule – który jest rezultatem projektu dotyczącego różnych typów decyzji w sytuacjach niepewności związanej z postępem w naukach i technologiach biomedycznych – przedstawię analizę sytuacji niepewności normatywnej, czyli takich, w których podmiot (...) musi podjąć decyzję, nie mając pewności co do tego, jaka norma postępowania jest właściwa, np. dlatego, że ma sprzeczne intuicje normatywne na temat dopuszczalności danej decyzji. Stanowisko, które określa się niekiedy mianem komparatywizmu, głosi, że w tego typu sytuacjach należy uwzględniać nie tylko stopnie przekonań podmiotu w kwestii różnych norm, ale także to, na ile możliwe decyzje warte są podjęcia wedle tych norm. Przedstawię tu analizę kilku przypadków niepewności normatywnej, a także charakterystyczny argument przeciwko dotychczasowym wersjom komparatywizmu, wskazujący, że nie uwzględniają one różnych nastawień do ryzyka w sytuacjach niepewności normatywnej, choć dopuszczają jednocześnie różne nastawienia do ryzyka w sytuacjach niepewności empirycznej. Pokażę też, że zasada ostrożności dotycząca statusu moralnego w upraszczający sposób przedstawia sytuacje niepewności normatywnej. (shrink)

Since the publication of Ekins’ The Nature of Legislative Intent, significant attention has been paid to common attitude models of legislative intention, that is, models that require unanimity among its group members. A common interpretation of Ekins is that these common attitudes are to be preferred over aggregated attitudes. I argue that any feasible theory of legislative attitudes will require non-trivial aggregation (ie. not based on unanimity rules alone). Two arguments are put forward in this regard: first, that non-trivial aggregation (...) better explains uncooperative legislative behaviour and second, that mathematical problems with aggregation apply to common attitudes as well since they involve trivial aggregation. These arguments generalise to theories of common attitudes other than Ekins’. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of evidential considerations in relation to pragmatic concerns in statements of group belief, focusing on scientific collaborations that are constituted in part by the aim of evaluating the evidence for scientific claims (evidential collaborations). Drawing upon a case study in high energy particle physics, I seek to show how pragmatic factors that enter into the decision to issue a group statement contribute positively to the epistemic functioning of such groups, contrary to the implications of much (...) of the existing discussion of group belief. I conclude by suggesting that applying social epistemological considerations to scientific collaborations could be practically beneficial, but only if an appropriately broad range of epistemic values is considered. (shrink)

In recent years, judgement aggregation has emerged as an important area of social choice theory. Judgement aggregation is concerned with aggregating sets of individual judgements over logically connected propositions into a set of collective judgements. It has been shown that even seemingly weak conditions on the aggregation function make it impossible to find functions that produce rational collective judgements from all possible rational individual judgements. This implies that the step from individual judgements to collective judgements requires trade-offs between different desiderata, (...) such as universal domain, rationality, epistemological quality, and unbiasedness. These dilemmas challenge us to decide which conditions we should relax. The typical application for judgement aggregation is the problem of group decision making. Juries and expert committees are the stock examples. However, the relevance of judgement aggregation goes beyond these cases. In this survey I review some core results in the field of judgement aggregation and social epistemology and discuss their implications for the analysis of distributed thinking. (shrink)

In this essay we try an answer to the question has intentionality to be reduced to anything? We propose that it is possible to reduce any variety of intentionality to a specification of mechanisms (internal organization of the items involved in a given intentional phenomenon) and a historical pattern of interaction (structure of mutual significant relations historically acquired by different items involved in the same intentional phenomenon). We first clarify the meaning of this proposal having recourse to the Ruth Millikan’s (...) teleosemantics. Then, we assess the relevance and feasibility of our proposal, considering, in a succession, the case of animals and humans, of machines, and of sophisticated human collectives. We conclude arguing the heuristic nature of the proposed reduction. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n2p255. (shrink)

It is both a moral tragedy and a travesty of social justice that responses to present unacceptable levels of Greenhouse Gases often involve constraining development, and that the burden of t...

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected issues often leads to collective inconsistency. This study examines two collective decision-making procedures designed to avoid such inconsistency—one premise-based and the other conclusion-based. While the relative desirability of the two procedures has been studied extensively from a theoretical perspective, the preference of individuals regarding the two procedures has been less studied empirically. In the present study, a scenario-based questionnaire survey of participant preferences for the two procedures was conducted, taking into consideration prevailing (...) social norms in the society to which the participants belong and the heterogeneity of the participants’ past experiences. Results show that a minority opinion not matching a prevailing social norm is more likely to be supported when the conclusion-based procedure is used. This can be explained by a basic property of the conclusion-based procedure: The procedure does not require voters to reveal their reasons for reaching a particular conclusion. This property proves appealing for participants who have a minority opinion. Such a finding is highly relevant to future studies on strategic behaviors in choosing a collective decision-making procedure. (shrink)

Evidential pluralism has been used to justify mixed-method research in political science. The combination of methodologies within case study analysis, however, has not received as much attention. This article applies the theory of evidential pluralism to causal inference in the case study method process tracing. I argue that different methodologies for process tracing commit to distinct fundamental theories of causation. I show that, problematically, one methodology may not recognize as genuine knowledge the fundamental claims of the other. By evaluating the (...) epistemic reliability of these fundamental claims, we can find a way out of such conflicts and rescue pluralism. (shrink)

Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology (...) and suggest a way to vindicate it. (shrink)

In this companion piece to 'On the Philosophy of Group Decision Methods I: The Non-Obviousness of Majority Rule', we take a closer look at some competitors of majority rule. This exploration supplements the conclusions of the other piece, as well as offers a further-reaching introduction to some of the challenges that this field currently poses to philosophers.

Majority rule is often adopted almost by default as a group decision rule. One might think, therefore, that the conditions under which it applies, and the argument on its behalf, are well understood. However, the standard arguments in support of majority rule display systematic deficiencies. This article explores these weaknesses, and assesses what can be said on behalf of majority rule.

: For philosophers of science interested in elucidating the social character of science, an important question concerns the manner in which and degree to which the objectivity of scientific knowledge is socially constituted. We address this broad question by focusing specifically on philosophical theories of evidence. To get at the social character of evidence, we take an interdisciplinary approach informed by categories from argumentation studies. We then test these categories by exploring their applicability to a case study from high-energy physics. (...) Our central claim is that normative philosophy of science must move beyond abstract theories of justification, confirmation, or evidence conceived impersonally and incorporate a theoretical perspective that includes dialogical elements, either as adjuncts to impersonal theories of evidence or as intrinsic to the cogency of scientific argumentation. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the (...) conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions. (shrink)

How sensitive should you be to the testimony of others? You saw the car that caused an accident going through traffic lights on the red; or so you thought. Should you revise your belief on discovering that the majority of bystanders, equally well-equipped, equally well-positioned and equally impartial, reported that it went through on the green? Or take another case. You believe that intelligent design is the best explanation for the order of the living universe. Should you revise that belief (...) on finding that most other people, or at least most who by your own lights are as intelligent, informed and impartial as yourself, believe that evolutionary theory offers the better account? Should you do this, in particular, if your own personal sense of where the evidence points – like your own vivid memory of the car going through on the red – remains firmly on the side of intelligent design? Assume, to take a third case, that there is a matter of fact about whether abortion is right or wrong. You believe that it is wrong, having a firm picture of it as an act on a par with murder. Should you revise that belief on discovering that among those whom you regard as equally intelligent, informed and impartial, most believe that abortion is not wrong, or at least not wrong in the way that murder is wrong? Should you do this, in particular, if your own personal sense of abortion remains unchanged; it still seems to you to be a grievous wrong? Should you put aside your own sense of things as mistaken, in the way you might put aside your imagined memory of the car going through on the red, and decide to go along with the majority view? (shrink)

The rationality of individual agents is secured for the most part by their make-up or design. Some agents, however – in particular, human beings – rely on the intentional exercise of thinking or reasoning in order to promote their rationality further; this is the activity that is classically exemplified in Rodin’s sculpture of Le Penseur. Do group agents have to rely on reasoning in order to maintain a rational profile? Recent results in the theory of judgment aggregation show that under (...) a range of plausible conditions they do. In a slogan: group agents are made, not born. (shrink)

Critics and defenders of Rawls' idea of public reason have tended to neglect the relationship between this idea and his conception of democratic legitimacy. I shall argue that Rawls' idea of public reason can be interpreted in two different ways, and that the two interpretations support two different conceptions of legitimacy. What I call the substantive interpretation of Rawls' idea of public reason demands that it applies not just to the process of democratic decision-making, but that it extends to the (...) substantive justification of democratic decisions. I shall argue against this interpretation and suggest a procedural interpretation instead. On this view, public reason is invoked when it comes to the political justification of the principles that should govern the process of democratic decision-making, but not – at least not directly – in relation to the content of public deliberation. (shrink)

The standard image of how consensus can be achieved is by pooling evidence and reducing if not eliminating disagreements. But rather than just pooling substantive evidence on a certain question, why not also take into account the formal, testimonial evidence provided by the fact that a majority of the group adopt a particular answer? Shouldn't we be reinforced by the discovery that we are on that majority side, and undermined by the discovery that we are not? Shouldn't this be so, (...) in particular, when Condorcet's jury theorem applies? It turns out not. There are serious problems attending any strategy of majoritarian deference. (shrink)

Philip Pettit ,Aude Bandini | : La démocratie signifie d’abord et avant toute chose l’idée d’un contrôle populaire, et ce par l’ensemble des moyens possibles. Ces moyens donnent lieu à la légitimité. Mais ces contrôles populaires, du moins tels qu’ils sont entendus dans de nombreuses discussions, ne donnent pas lieu à la légitimité espérée. Les théories de la démocratie ne partagent pas une même conception des choses à ce sujet, ce qui donne lieu à une pluralité d’approches. Dans cet article, (...) l’auteur soutient que la réponse la plus intéressante à cette question implique une réinterprétation de la notion de contrôle populaire. | : Democracy means popular control, by almost all accounts. And by almost all accounts democracy entails legitimacy. But popular control, at least as that is understood in many discussions, does not entail legitimacy. So something has got to give. Democratic theories divide on what this is, so that the question prompts a taxonomy of approaches. The most appealing answer, so the paper suggests, involves a reinterpretation of the notion of popular control. (shrink)

Can groups be rational agents over and above their individual members? We argue that group agents are distinguished by their capacity to mimic the way in which individual agents act and that this capacity must “supervene” on the group members' contributions. But what is the nature of this supervenience relation? Focusing on group judgments, we argue that, for a group to be rational, its judgment on a particular proposition cannot generally be a function of the members' individual judgments on that (...) proposition. Rather, it must be a function of their individual sets of judgments across many propositions. So knowing what the group members individually think about some proposition does not generally tell us how the group collectively adjudicates that proposition: the supervenience relation must be “setwise,” not “proposition‐wise.” Our account preserves the individualistic view that group agency is nothing mysterious but also suggests that a group agent may hold judgments that are not directly continuous with its members' corresponding individual judgments. (shrink)

Group agents have been represented as expressive fictions by those who treat ascriptions of agency to groups as metaphorical; as pragmatic fictions by those who think that the agency ascribed to groups belongs in the first place to a distinct individual or set of individuals; and as theoretical fictions by those who think that postulating group agents serves no indispensable role in our theory of the social world. This paper identifies, criticizes and rejects each of these views, defending a strong (...) realist position. (shrink)

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard interpretations of epistemic democracy, (...) however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy. Key Words: legitimacy • deliberative democracy • epistemic democracy • social epistemology. (shrink)

The article discusses the implications of the well‐known discursive dilemma. The dilemma arises whenever a reasoned decision has to be taken by a collective decision‐maker and generates persistent contradiction between what is defined as collective reason and public opinion. Following Philip Pettit, I argue that collective reason is normatively preferable and that the role of existing constitutional institutions in contemporary democracies is to collectivise reason. However, this makes the frustration of popular will a systematic by‐product of any well‐functioning political process. (...) I argue that the only way out is if individual beliefs are subject to revision during cycles of public deliberations with the responsibility to lead this thrusted upon elected representatives. (shrink)

The following Review Essay, inspired by Tracy Isaacs’ new book, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, connects the philosophical literature on group agency with recent trends in international criminal law. Part I of the Essay sketches out the relevant philosophical positions, including collectivist and individualist accounts of group agency. Particular attention is paid to Kornhauser and Sager’s development of the doctrinal paradox, Philip Pettit’s deployment of the paradox towards a general argument for group rationality, and Michael Bratman’s account of shared or (...) joint intentions. Part II then analyzes, with cautious support, Isaacs’ two-level solution, which entails both individual and collective moral responsibility. Under this view, collective moral agency is a real phenomenon, though the existence of the collective neither obviates nor eliminates the moral responsibility of the individuals from which it is composed. My own evaluation of the proposed solution concentrates on Davidson’s Principle of Charity and whether behavior interpretation requires viewing such agents in particular ways so as to maximize rationality. By analogy to the distinctive rationality of long-term plans, where the rationality of an individual act can only be understood relative to its place in the rationally justified long-term plan of a single individual, I also consider the rationality of individual acts whose rationality can only be understood relative to the group endeavors of which they are a part. Finally, Part III traces some implications of the two-level solution for legal doctrine, in particular the role of collective organizations in the recent jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court. For example, I note that the ICC has recently become more and more focused on the role played by goal-oriented collectives, especially with regard to the plan or policy requirement for crimes against humanity and, in the context of modes of liability, indirect liability for crimes committed through an organization. (shrink)

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...) decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation. (shrink)

In his paper, "The Right of the Guilty," Corey Brettschneider aims to develop and defend a theory of punishment within the framework of a liberal-contractarian conception of political legitimacy. My response argues that this attempt to extend the liberal-contractarian theory reveals, in a particularly clear and striking manner, deep and ultimately insurmountable conceptual difficulties for that theory.

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

Which rules for aggregating judgments on logically connected propositions are manipulable and which not? In this paper, we introduce a preference-free concept of non-manipulability and contrast it with a preference-theoretic concept of strategy-proofness. We characterize all non-manipulable and all strategy-proof judgment aggregation rules and prove an impossibility theorem similar to the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem. We also discuss weaker forms of non-manipulability and strategy-proofness. Comparing two frequently discussed aggregation rules, we show that “conclusion-based voting” is less vulnerable to manipulation than “premise-based voting”, (...) which is strategy-proof only for “reason-oriented” individuals. Surprisingly, for “outcome-oriented” individuals, the two rules are strategically equivalent, generating identical judgments in equilibrium. Our results introduce game-theoretic considerations into judgment aggregation and have implications for debates on deliberative democracy. (shrink)

In a recent paper on ‘The Many as One’, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory. How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind? How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity? We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense. But should we expect (...) integration among the many in the legislature, for example, or among the many on the courts? We agree with Kornhauser and Sager about a number of their claims but think that they miss out on important detail and do not achieve a fully general perspective on the issues raised. Our own contribution is in three sections. We address, first, the nature of the integrity challenge; second, the range of cases in which the challenge arises; and third, the question of whether public groups should be designed and required to meet that challenge. (shrink)

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democats must be (...) "holistic": It must focus on webs of connected propositions, not on one proposition at a time, which echoes the Duhem-Quine "holism thesis" on scientific theory testing. My approach provides a map of the logical space in which different possible group communication processes are located. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying institutional design in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e. its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group (...) can meet two challenges: the ‘rationality challenge’ and the ‘knowledge challenge’. The rationality challenge arises when a group is required to endorse consistent beliefs or judgments; the knowledge challenge arises when the group’s beliefs or judgments are required to track certain truths. My discussion seeks to identify those properties of an aggregation procedure that affect a group’s success at meeting each of the two challenges. (shrink)

Alice Le Goff ,Christian Nadeau | : Ce texte constitue une introduction au dossier. Il introduit les différentes contributions en mettant en relief leurs principales orientations. Ce faisant, il propose donc une cartographie conceptuelle, forcément partielle, des enjeux associés à la notion de démocratie épistémique et des enjeux du croisement de cette notion avec celle de démocratie de contestation. En un premier temps, nous revenons sur l’apport du procéduralisme épistémique et sur les questions qu’il soulève. Ensuite, nous revenons sur le (...) néo-pragmatisme et la façon dont il permet d’envisager une justification épistémique de la démocratie. Puis nous mettons l’accent sur les enjeux d’un dialogue entre modèle républicain de la démocratie contestataire et modèle épistémique. Enfin, le texte propose un résumé du parcours proposé dans le cadre de ce dossier. | : This introduction brings out the main lines of the articles collected in the present issue. Our aim is to provide the reader with a conceptual overview of the main stakes of epistemic democracy and of its intersections with the model of contestatory democracy. First, we focus on epistemic proceduralism, its contributions and the questions it raises. Second, we emphasize the way neo-pragmatism deals with the epistemic justification of democracy. Then, we insist on the interest of a dialogue between epistemic democracy and the neo-republican model of contestatory democracy. Finally, the text sums up the path followed in that issue. (shrink)

The majority rule has caught much attention in recent debate about the aggregation of judgments. But its role in finding the truth is limited. A majority of expert judgments is not necessarily authoritative, even if all experts are equally competent, if they make their judgments independently of each other, and if all the judgments are based on the same source of (good) evidence. In this paper I demonstrate this limitation by presenting a simple counterexample and a related general result. I (...) pave the way for this argument by introducing a Bayesian model of evidence and expert judgment in order to give a precise account of the basic problem. (shrink)

Most political liberals argue that only rules, policies and institutions that are part of society’s basic structure need to be justified with so-called public reasons. Laws enacted outside this set are legitimate if and when public reasons can justify the procedure that selects them. I argue that this view is susceptible to known problems from social choice theory. However, there are resources within political liberalism that could address them. If the scope of public reason is extended beyond the basic structure (...) it could order people’s preferences in a way that circumvents the identified issues. (shrink)

Epistemic systems are social processes generating judgments of truth and falsity. I outline a mathematical theory of epistemic systems that applies widely. Areas of application include pure science, torture, police forensics, espionage, auditing, clinical medical testing, democratic procedure, and the market economy. I examine torture and police forensics in relative detail. This paper is an exercise in comparative institutional epistemics, which considers how the institutions of an epistemic system influence its performance as measured by such things as error rates and (...) the volume of judgments generated. (shrink)

According to Sosa, knowledge is apt belief, where a belief is apt when accurate because adroit. Sosa :465–475, 2010; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) adds to his triple-A analysis of knowledge, a triple-S analysis of competence, where a complete competence combines its seat, shape and situation. Much of Sosa’s influential work assumes that epistemic agents are individuals who acquire knowledge when they hit the truth through exercising their own individual skills in appropriate shapes and situations. This paper (...) explores an extension of Sosa’s framework to a social setting in which groups constitute epistemic agents over and above their individual members. The claim is that groups can be ascribed knowledge in virtue of hitting the truth through exercising their competences in appropriate shapes and situations. While knowledge at the collective level may diverge from knowledge at the individual level, the competences of groups are nothing over and above the combined competences of their members. The ensuing view thus has implications for the debate over reduction and supervenience in collective epistemology. (shrink)

Paradoxical results concerning judgment aggregation have recently been invoked to defend the thesis that a corporate agent can be morally responsible for a decision without any of its individual members bearing such responsibility. I contend that the arguments offered for this irreducibility thesis are inconclusive. They do not pay enough attention to how we evaluate individual moral responsibility, in particular not to the role that a flawed assessment of the normative reasons that bear on the issue to be decided on (...) play in this context. I go on to propose a method for distributing corporate responsibility to individual members within the judgment aggregation framework. (shrink)

The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on those propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. The literature on judgment aggregation refers to that problem as the discursive dilemma. In this paper, we motivate that many groups do not only want to reach a factually right conclusion, but also want to correctly evaluate the reasons for that conclusion. In (...) other words, we address the problem of tracking the true situation instead of merely selecting the right outcome. We set up a probabilistic model analogous to Bovens and Rabinowicz (2006) and compare several aggregation procedures by means of theoretical results, numerical simulations and practical considerations. Among them are the premise-based, the situation-based and the distance-based procedure. Our findings confirm the conjecture in Hartmann, Pigozzi and Sprenger (2008) that the premise-based procedure is a crude, but reliable and sometimes even optimal form of judgment aggregation. (shrink)

The doctrinal paradox shows that aggregating individual judgments by taking a majority vote does not always yield a consistent set of collective judgments. Philip Pettit, Luc Bovens, and Wlodek Rabinowicz have recently argued for the epistemic superiority of an aggregation procedure that always yields a consistent set of judgments. This paper identifies several additional epistemic advantages of their consistency maintaining procedure. However, this paper also shows that there are some circumstances where the majority vote procedure is epistemically superior. The epistemic (...) value of maintaining consistency does not always outweigh the epistemic value of making true judgments. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 19 Collectivities can have obligations beyond the aggregate of pre-existing obligations of their members. Certain such collective obligations _distribute_, i.e., become members’ obligations to do their fair share. In _incremental good_ cases, i.e., those in which a member’s fair share would go part way toward fulfilling the collectivity’s obligation, each member has an unconditional obligation to contribute.States are involuntary collectivities that bear moral obligations. Certain states, _democratic legal states_, are collectivities whose obligations can distribute. Many existing (...) states are democratic legal states, but none satisfies more rigorous requirements of distributive justice. There, citizens who hold assets, in excess of what is just, bear a distributed duty to dedicate that excess toward correcting the injustice. It is an incremental good case not conditioned on the conformity of others who are also wealthier than justice allows, nor on the diligence of the state in meeting its obligations. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 19 Collectivities can have obligations beyond the aggregate of pre-existing obligations of their members. Certain such collective obligations _distribute_, i.e., become members’ obligations to do their fair share. In _incremental good_ cases, i.e., those in which a member’s fair share would go part way toward fulfilling the collectivity’s obligation, each member has an unconditional obligation to contribute.States are involuntary collectivities that bear moral obligations. Certain states, _democratic legal states_, are collectivities whose obligations can distribute. Many existing (...) states are democratic legal states, but none satisfies more rigorous requirements of distributive justice. There, citizens who hold assets, in excess of what is just, bear a distributed duty to dedicate that excess toward correcting the injustice. It is an incremental good case not conditioned on the conformity of others who are also wealthier than justice allows, nor on the diligence of the state in meeting its obligations. (shrink)

What is the relationship between degrees of belief and binary beliefs? Can the latter be expressed as a function of the former—a so-called “belief-binarization rule”—without running into difficulties such as the lottery paradox? We show that this problem can be usefully analyzed from the perspective of judgment-aggregation theory. Although some formal similarities between belief binarization and judgment aggregation have been noted before, the connection between the two problems has not yet been studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek (...) to fill this gap. The paper is organized around a baseline impossibility theorem, which we use to map out the space of possible solutions to the belief-binarization problem. Our theorem shows that, except in limiting cases, there exists no belief-binarization rule satisfying four initially plausible desiderata. Surprisingly, this result is a direct corollary of the judgment-aggregation variant of Arrow’s classic impossibility theorem in social choice theory. (shrink)