Philip Pettit offers a new insight into moral psychology. He shows that attachments such as love, and certain virtues such as honesty, require their characteristic behaviours not only as things actually are, but also in cases where things are different from how they actually are. He explores the implications of this idea for key moral issues.

Freedom, in Philip Pettit's provocative analysis, requires more than just being let alone. In Just Freedom, a succinct articulation of the republican philosophy for which he is renowned, Pettit builds a theory of universal freedom as nondomination. Seen through this lens, even societies that consider themselves free may find their political arrangements lacking. Do those arrangements protect people's liberties equally? Are they subject to the equally shared control of those they protect? Do they allow the different peoples of the world (...) to live in equal freedom? With elegant, user-friendly tests of freedom--the eyeball test, the tough luck test, and the straight talk test--Pettit addresses these questions, laying out essential yardsticks for policymakers and concerned citizens alike. An invitation to join in a program that would better articulate and realize justice in our social, democratic, and international lives, Just Freedom offers readers an essential starting place for the world's thorniest problems. (shrink)

In The Robust Demands of the Good Pettit claims that the three goods he takes to be central to the good, namely attachment, virtue and respect, share a common structure: they are robustly demanding in that they require the provision of an associated benefit not just under actual but across various possible circumstances. The aim of this paper is to show that the unified account of the good misconstrues the nature of respect. First, I argue that Pettit’s account of respect (...) as robust non-interference cannot account for the particularly robust kind of robustness that respect requires and fails to clarify the relation between respect and freedom. Second, drawing on Pettit’s earlier work, I propose to reconceive of respect as the robust provision of discursive address. This account solves the ambiguities of Pettit’s account of respect. However, it suggests that the particularly robust demands of respect are demands of the right, not the good. (shrink)

Philip Pettit has identified some interesting apparent commonalities among core human values like love, friendship, virtue, and respect. These are all, Pettit argues, ‘robustly demanding’: they require us to provide certain benefits across ranges of alternative scenarios. Pettit also suggests a general ‘rationale’ for valuing such goods, which draws on his work on freedom. In this paper, I zoom in on love in particular. I critically assess whether Pettit’s schematic account of love’s value adequately captures what we typically value in (...) valuing love. And I scrutinize the analogy Pettit suggests between the rationale for valuing freedom and his rationale for valuing love. My conclusion is that whereas Pettit’s account of love and its value does not strictly speaking contain false propositions, it ends up being a somewhat skewed account of love’s value. Finally, I bring up some widely discussed aspects of love’s value not captured by Pettit’s account. (shrink)

Philip Pettit has argued that the goods of attachment, virtue, and respect are robust goods in the sense that they require both the actual provision of certain benefits and the modally robust provision of these benefits. He also claims that we value the robustness of these goods because it diminishes our vulnerability to others. I question whether robustness really reduces vulnerability and argue that even if it does, vulnerability reduction is not the reason we value robustness. In place of Pettit’s (...) account, I defend a promotional account of the value of robustness. I argue that we value robustness because it increases the probability we will enjoy a certain kind of benefit. (shrink)