Efficiency requires legislative political institutions. There are many ways efficiency can be promoted, and so an ongoing legislative institution is necessary to resolve this choice in a politically sustainable and economically flexible way. This poses serious problems for classical liberal proposals to constitutionally protect markets from government intervention, as seen in the work of Ilya Somin, Guido Pincione & Fernando Tesón and others. The argument for the political nature of efficiency is set out in terms of both Pareto optimality and (...) aggregate welfare maximisation, and similar arguments can be generalised to other social values. (shrink)

Mark Pennington argues political systems should be decentralized in order to facilitate experimental learning about distributive justice. Pointing out the problems with Pennington's Hayekian formulation, I reframe his argument as an extension of the Millian idea of 'experiments in living.' However, the experimental case for decentralization is limited in several ways. Even if decentralization improves our knowledge about justice, it impedes the actual implementation of all conceptions of justice other than libertarianism. I conclude by arguing for the compatibility of egalitarian (...) redistribution with the epistemic virtues of markets pointed out by Hayek. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore argues that deliberation and the aggregation of citizens' dispersed knowledge should tend to produce better consequences than rule by the one or the few. However, she pays insufficient attention to the epistemic processes necessary to realize these democratic goods. In particular, she fails to consider the question of where citizens' beliefs and ideas come from, with the result that the democratic decision mechanisms she focuses on are insufficiently powerful to justify her consequentialist defense of mass (...) decision making. If “the few” are technocratic experts, Landemore supplies little reason to resist their rule on epistemic grounds, for she does not secure a knowledge base for the citizens that might compete with the knowledge that is often attributed to such “experts.” Aggregating and deliberating about poor information is no substitute for good information. Her book can therefore be seen as a call for a new phase of epistemic political theory that compares the real-world knowledgeability of ordinary citizens and putative experts, but it does not convincingly deliver on its goal to demonstrate the epistemic superiority of the former. (shrink)

Several prominent voices have called for a democratization of science through deliberative processes that include a diverse range of perspectives and values. We bring these scholars into conversation with extant research on democratic deliberation in political theory and the social sciences. In doing so, we identify systematic barriers to the effectiveness of inclusive deliberation in both scientific and political settings. We are particularly interested in what we call misidentified dissent, where deliberations are starkly framed at the outset in terms of (...) dissenting positions without properly distinguishing the kinds of difference and disagreement motivating dissent. (shrink)

Advocates of ?deliberative democracy? want citizens to actively participate in serious dialogue over political issues, not merely go to the polls every few years. Unfortunately, these ideals don't take into account widespread political ignorance and irrationality. Most voters neither attain the level of knowledge needed to make deliberative democracy work, nor do they rationally evaluate the political information they do possess. The vast size and complexity of modern government make it unlikely that most citizens can ever reach the levels of (...) knowledge and rationality required by deliberative democracy, even if they were better informed than they are at present. (shrink)

Abstract The article addresses three aspects of the humanitarian intervention doctrine. It argues, first, that the value of sovereignty rests on the justified social processes of the target state ? the horizontal contract. Foreign interventions, even when otherwise justified, must respect the horizontal contract. In contrast, morally objectionable social processes (such as the subjection of women) are not protected by sovereignty (intervention, of course, may be banned for other reasons). In addition, tyrants have no moral protection against interventions directed at (...) them. Second, the article addresses the internal legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. It concludes that the liberal state may only use voluntary soldiers (either the voluntary army or mercenaries) to conduct humanitarian intervention. Conscription for that purpose is not permissible. The article shows that the long-standing criticism of mercenaries stems from a romantic prejudice and is thus unfair. Third, the article makes a distinction between intention (the determination to perform an action) and motive (a further goal that the agent seeks with that action) and shows that only intention is relevant for humanitarian intervention. A justified humanitarian intervention requires the intention to liberate the victims, but not necessarily a good further motive. It shows how mainstream doctrine has impermissibly confused the two concepts. (shrink)

This article examines the consequences of the politicization of health care in the United Kingdom following the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. The NHS is founded on the principle of universal access to health care free at the point of use but in reality charges exist for some services and other services are rationed. Not to charge and/or ration would create a common-pool resource with no means of conserving scarce resources. Taking rationing decisions in the political (...) realm means that the values and priorities of individual patients are marginalized and the preferences of powerful organized groups able to capture the political process dominate. The key lesson for international health care reform is that the politicization of health care via the NHS has not led to the realization of egalitarian ends but rather has empowered vested and organized interests at the expense of individual patients. (shrink)

Julia Maskivker’s The Duty to Vote is a very welcome contribution to the discussion of the theory of citizen participation in politics.1 1 This is an area that has received far too little attention from philosophers and political theorists. It is receiving more attention recently due to the spate of books by mostly libertarian writers, which argue that citizens in a democracy tend to be poorly informed, or at best, excessively belligerent, and that this fact is one that arises from (...) the very nature of citizen participation in a democracy. These writers argue that democracy itself should be scrapped in significant part in favour of rule by experts or massive reduction in the size and scope of government in order to give greater scope to markets in the regulation of the social world we live in. (shrink)

I argue that, from the liberal perspective, citizens have a pro tanto moral duty to cultivate and maintain a readiness to participate in politics when such an action is called for from the moral perspective—I will call it “the pro tanto duty of political engagement.” It requires a citizen to monitor what the government is doing, evaluate its actions, and learn what she can do to intervene politically. In Section 1, I will discuss some doubts on the pro tanto duty (...) of political engagement. In Section 2, I will describe Alexander Guerrero’s account of culpable ignorance and argue from his account that the pro tanto duty of political engagement is derived from a general moral duty to properly manage one’s morally relevant beliefs. In Section 3, I will argue that to properly assess the moral significance of any government policy or policy proposal, one must learn about the lives and personal values of those who would be affected by the policy. (shrink)

Scott Soames’s book The World Philosophy Made is a history of ideas spanning from the ancient Greeks until today.1 1 At nearly 400 pages of tightly printed text, the book is enormous in its scope, surveying ideas not only in philosophy but also in physics, mathematical logic, cognitive science, economics, linguistics, social science, legal theory and more. Among the topics discussed in detail are: the debate about immanent vs. transcendent forms; the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology; the (...) heliocentric model of the solar system and retrograde planetary motion; set-theoretic reductions of number and the question of whether set theory counts as logic; Gödel’s completeness and incompleteness proofs; the Chomskian revolution in linguistics; public choice theory; the representational theory of mind; special and general relativity; the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the libertarian challenge to Rawlsian liberalism; the relation between Marx’s philosophy and 20th century socialist political movements; the rise of the administrative state; the role of evolution and child development in the acquisition of moral sentiments; and death and the meaning of life. This is by no means a complete list. (shrink)