Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Knowledge and skill are intimately connected. In this essay, I discuss the question of their relationship and of which (if any) is prior to which in the order of explanation. I review some of the answers that have been given thus far in the literature, with a particular focus on the many foundational issues in epistemology that intersect with the philosophy of skill.

ABSTRACTIlya Somin's case for smaller government and “foot voting” rests on at least two questionable assumptions. The first is that voter ignorance is based on rational calculation. This assumption requires arbitrary stipulations about the degree of voter altruism and the low values voters assign to the victory of their candidates. The second is that voter ignorance betokens bad public policy. But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. How can this be the case? One explanation is that individually ignorant (...) voters are small pieces of a large system that divides intellectual labor through discussions among elites, opinion leaders, and ordinary citizens. This system may entitle voters to trust in the opinions of others, sparing them the need to be well informed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin, like several other political epistemologists, effectively exposes the extent of public ignorance and the ways in which such ignorance may damage democratic outcomes. This underpins his case for a more streamlined state, leaving more to individual “foot voting”—where citizens are better incentivized to choose knowledgeably and rationally. One cannot dispute the fact of deep public ignorance. However, one can question the widespread assumption that ignorance is necessarily ethically significant, always productive of undesirable outcomes, or otherwise implicitly dangerous for (...) democracy. The sheer lack of individual efficacy in mass democracies not only incentivizes ignorance, but also creates conditions wherein such ignorance is individually harmless and unlikely in the aggregate to greatly contribute to one or another outcome. Beyond this, there may be no way to attain meaningful knowledge in the areas where democratic decision making is most fraught. Indeed, ignorance may at times lead to better outcomes than would knowledge. The seemingly unassailable status of democracy itself, and the valuable institutional stability that this status ensures, seem to be founded upon a bedrock of public ignorance as to the real nature of democracy. (shrink)

“The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm (...) the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate's (and subsidiary decision makers') ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse's findings. (shrink)

Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers – including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard – have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to “recover” the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of the main reasons why philosophers have taken understanding (...) to be more valuable than knowledge, focusing on claims that it is more transparent, that it better reflects or mirrors the world, and that it is a greater intellectual achievement. (shrink)

Abstract If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over government. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. The problem is exacerbated by voters? strong incentive to be ?rationally ignorant? of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented through ?shortcut? methods of (...) economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in scope. (shrink)

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. Not all groups are moral agents. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties. Moreover, if such duties imply ability then moral agents – of both the individual and group varieties – can only bear duties over actions they are able to perform. I tease out the implications of this for duties over group actions, and argue that groups in many instances cannot bear these duties. This is because only groups (...) with the right kind of structure – groups I call ‘collectives’ – have the agency to bear action-demanding duties. Yet neither can individuals bear these duties, assuming that individuals cannot perform group actions and that duty implies ability. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties to perform some group actions. I argue we can solve this problem by assigning collectivization duties to individuals – duties to form a collective that then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

Hobbits and hooligans -- Ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists -- Political participation corrupts -- Politics doesn't empower you or me -- Politics is not a poem -- The right to competent government -- Is democracy competent? -- The rule of the knowers -- Civic enemies.

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this respect, and go on to suggest a complementary account that stresses the central role (...) of internally democratic and participatory political parties in actualising popular sovereignty, drawing on the democratic theory of Hans Kelsen. (shrink)

For decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little or no effort to acquire political information. Rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so‐called “paradox of voting” because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well informed. Furthermore, rational ignorance leads not only to inadequate acquisition of political information, but also to ineffective use (...) of the information that citizens do possess. The combination of these two problems has fundamental implications for a variety of issues in public policy and international affairs. (shrink)

This essay defends a version of the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) – the doctrine that there is normally a stronger reason against an act that has a bad state of affairs as one of its intended effects than against an otherwise similar act that has that bad state of affairs as an unintended effect. First, a precise account of this version of the DDE is given. Secondly, some suggestions are made about why we should believe the DDE, and about (...) why it is true. Finally, a solution is developed to the so-called ‘closeness problem’ that any version of the DDE must face. (shrink)

In this paper, I submit that it is the controlled part of skilled action, that is, that part of an action that accounts for the exact, nuanced ways in which a skilled performer modifies, adjusts and guides her performance for which an adequate, philosophical theory of skill must account. I will argue that neither Jason Stanley nor Hubert Dreyfus have an adequate account of control. Further, and perhaps surprisingly, I will argue that both Stanley and Dreyfus relinquish an account of (...) control for precisely the same reason: each reduce control to a passive, mechanistic, automatic process, which then prevents them from producing a substantive account of how controlled processes can be characterized by seemingly intelligent features and integrated with personal-level states. I will end by introducing three different kinds of control, which are constitutive of skilled action: strategic control, selective, top–down, automatic attention, and motor control. It will become clear that Dreyfus cannot account for any of these three kinds of control while Stanley has difficulty tackling the two latter kinds. (shrink)

A form of elitism undermines much uniting on voter competence. The elitist move occurs when an author uses a self‐serving worldview as the basis for evaluating voters. Such elitism is apparent in widely cited measures of “political knowledge” and in common claims about what voters should know. The elitist move typically limits the credibility and practical relevance of the analysis by leading writers to draw unreliable conclusions about voter competence. I propose a more constructive way of thinking about what voters (...) know. Its chief virtue is its consistency with basic facts about the relationship between information and choice. (shrink)

A democratic society cannot flourish if its citizens merely pursue their own narrow interests. If it is to do more than survive, at least a substantial proportion of its citizens must fulfill responsibilities that go beyond simply avoiding the violation of others' rights and occasionally casting a vote. The vitality and success of a democracy requires that many citizens — ideally all of them — contribute something to their communities and participate responsibly in the political process. The disposition to do (...) these things is a large part of what constitutes civic virtue. But that virtue encompasses considerably more. My task here is to explore civic virtue. I first outline a conception of virtue in general and, with that set out, pursue the question of what makes a virtue civic. My special concern is to articulate what constitutes civic virtue in relation to an enduring problem for democratic societies and especially for the pluralistic democracies of the Western world: how to determine what constitutes a proper relation between religion and politics and, in the lives of religious citizens having civic virtue, an appropriate balance between religious and secular considerations. (shrink)

This essay aims to vindicate the importance of a theory of ordinary citizens' political prudence in a democratic society. It follows a reconstructive method, by looking at the full range of powers and decisions that are enabled by democratic rights in order to show that in contemporary democracies there is room for the exercise of political prudence by ordinary citizens. By the same method, it also reconstructs the main traits and manifestations of citizens' political prudence in the everyday politics of (...) our democracies. Theorizing citizens' political prudence is important for detecting and correcting the ways in which the citizens of a democratic society, as well as its institutions, may fail to fulfil the mandates of such an essential political virtue. (shrink)