Critical notice of On the people's terms: a Republican theory and model of democracy,by Philip Pettit,Cambridge University Press, 2012, xii+333pp.

This paper is a critical notice of Philip Pettit's On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Pettit argues that only Republicanism can respond appropriately to the ‘evil of subjection to another's will – particularly in important areas of personal choice’ because its ideal of liberty – freedom as non-domination – both captures better than liberalism our commitment to individual liberty and explains better our commitment to the legitimacy of democratic decision-making than standard democrat accounts. If this argument succeeds, it demonstrates that there is no real tension between the liberal thought that justice provides a standard for evaluating public decisions independent of the fact that they are taken democratically and the democratic thought that the fact that a decision is democratic suffices to make it legitimate. I argue, however, that Pettit finds himself caught between two contradictory positions: a version of Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty and a positive liberty account of democracy. And I show that his attempt to resolve the tension fails because it requires him to embrace the positive liberty account he is committed to rejecting.     

Epistemic justice as a condition of political freedom?

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom.     

Freedom as non-domination,education and the common avowable interests of pupils: A neo-republican critique of the Romanian educational legislation

An important branch of neo-republicanism holds that freedom as non-domination is the supreme ideal that should be pursued in a polity. In this paper I set out to better specify what neo-republicanism has to say about education. I propose a series of reforms that ought to track the common avowable interests of children, focusing on two important dimensions: i) establishing a proper institutional framework through which children can effectively influence decisions that will in turn affect them; and ii) how the civic education curricula should be modified so that the institutional framework will be upheld by virtuous future citizens. I then turn to showing how we can employ the neo-republican framework in order to criticise certain lacunae of educational systems and to improve upon these in a manner that would be in line with the desideratum of freedom as non-domination. The particular example that I focus on is that of Romania, a country whose educational legislation contains some minimal stipulations regarding civic education and pupils’ involvement in the decision-making process. Nonetheless, such stipulations either do not go far enough or are indeterminate, which might make them susceptible to implementation in a way that would be detrimental to the pupils’ common avowable interests.     

Rawls on Liberty and Domination

One of the central elements of John Rawls’ argument in support of his two principles of justice is the intuitive normative ideal of citizens as free and equal. But taken in isolation, the claim that citizens are to be treated as free and equal is extremely indeterminate, and has virtually no clear implications for policy. In order to remedy this, the two principles of justice, together with the stipulation that citizens have basic interests in developing their moral capacities and pursuing their conceptions of the good life, are meant to provide a more precise interpretation of what is involved in treating citizens as free and equal. Rawls’ critics, however, have argued that satisfying the two principles of justice is not the most appropriate or plausible way to respect the status of citizens as free and equal. In relation to this debate, the present paper has two aims. The first is to examine Rawls’ account of the type of freedom that a just society must guarantee equally to its citizens. I will argue that those who think of Rawls as a theorist of freedom as non-interference are mistaken, because his notion of liberty resembles in important respects the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. Second, I will consider the extent to which Rawls’ principles of justice successfully protect the freedom as non-domination of all citizens so as to effectively treat them as free and equal.     

The Gift of Law: Liberty,Legitimacy and Autonomy in The Social Contract

Abstract

I examine Rousseau’s claim that any given will can be either itself or another, and cannot be commuted (to representatives, for example), through an investigation of liberty and legitimacy in The Social Contract, with respect to which Rousseau elaborates his notion that we prescribe laws to ourselves. Through an examination of the logic of the general will, I attempt to show that, while the theory of legitimacy is radical, it is faced with serious problems that concern the identification of the we (or the I) that is supposed to be prescribing laws to itself, and that when we are (I am) supposedly doing so, the identity of the will is far from clear.     

Farewell to Political Obligation: In Defense of a Permissive Conception of Legitimacy

In the recent debate on political legitimacy, we have seen the emergence of a revisionist camp, advocating the idea of ‘legitimacy without political obligation,’ as opposed to the traditional view that political obligation is necessary for state legitimacy. The revisionist idea of legitimacy is appealing because if it stands, the widespread skepticism about the existence of political obligation will not lead us to conclude that the state is illegitimate. Unfortunately, existing conceptions of ‘legitimacy without political obligation’ are subject to serious objections. In this article, I propose a new conception of ‘legitimacy without political obligation,’ and defend it against various objections that the revisionist idea of legitimacy is either conceptually or morally mistaken. This new conception of legitimacy promises to advance the debates between anarchists and statists by making the task of philosophical anarchists significantly more difficult.     

Freedom as Non-domination and Democratic Inclusion

According to neo-republicans, democracy is morally justified because it is among the prerequisites for freedom as non-domination. The claim that democracy secures freedom as non-domination needs to explain why democratic procedures contribute to non-domination and for whom democracy secures non-domination. This requires an account of why domination is countered by democratic procedures and an account of to whom domination is countered by access to democratic procedures. Neo-republican theory of democracy is based on a detailed discussion of the former but a scant discussion of the latter. We address this lacuna by interpreting the two most influential principles of inclusion, the all-subjected principle and the all-affected principle, in light of neo-republican commitments. The preliminary conclusion is that both principles are able to capture relations of domination between the democratic state and the people controlled by it in the relevant sense. Yet, the state has virtually unlimited powers to control residents, but only limited powers to interfere in the lives of non-residents. Republican aspirations are therefore more in tune with the all-subjected principle according to which only residents in the territory of the state should be granted rights to political participation.     

The necessary connection between internal and external state legitimacy: concerns regarding intervention

It has been traditional in political philosophy to take internal and external state legitimacy as resting on distinct criteria. However, this is a view that is currently being challenged. Assuming that internal and external legitimacy rely on the same criterion, a possible worry that arises is that an unacceptable amount of intervention will necessarily become justifiable. I argue that such worries are not significant and that they do not rule out this alternative to the traditional view.     

The turn to the local: the possibility of returning health care to the community

It is not too early to suggest that the attempts to place medical cae in private hands (through group insurance arrangements) has not fulfilled its promise--or better, the promises that were made for it. Yet history has not been kind to plans to make government the single payer, and the laudable progress in medical technology has placed high-technology medical care beyond the reach of most private budgets. In this paper I suggest that the major problem of the U.S. health care system as presently conceived is a failure of legitimacy, and I put forward a proposal that purports to solve that problem. The proposal is to localize health care, on the model of a public school system, on the argument that such localization will answer most of the questions of legitimacy at the core of the private insurance imbroglio, provide a brake for medical costs, while preserving our ability to take advantage of the most advanced medical interventions. I present some initial arguments for the proposal, but await its proof in the dialogue emerging as the present insurance system collapses.     

Political Legitimacy,the Egalitarian Challenge,and Democracy

This article argues against the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, I propose a weaker set of conditions. First, I explain the case for the necessity of democracy. This is that only democracy can address the ‘egalitarian challenge’, i.e. ‘if we are all equal, why should only some of us wield political power?’. I show that if democracy really is a necessary condition of political legitimacy, then (what I label) the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy become intractable. I then argue that the egalitarian challenge is addressed where the requirements of (1) horizontal equality, (2) acceptable vertical inequality, and (3) publicity, are met and where (4) citizens have some institutionalized opportunity for a voice in decisions. I show that these conditions can be realized in non‐democratic form and conclude by explaining how the four conditions can be employed to make the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy more tractable. Overall, my ambitions are limited. I do not offer an all‐things‐considered case against democracy but I do show that (some) forms of non‐democratic government are permissible.     

Political reconciliation at the level of global governance1

This article applies the idea of political reconciliation to current debates on the role and legitimacy of global governance. My underlying thesis is that the idea of reconciliation fits better with the non-ideal circumstances of global injustice. To this end, I will first of all develop a three-tiered model of political reconciliation and introduce the related concept of restorative justice. I will then look at some of the most obvious forms of international and global injustice – historical injustice, economic exploitation, and political domination – and argue that a normative theory of political reconciliation provides better proposals for feasible global governance reforms than do theories of corrective, retributive, or distributive justice. Finally, I will make a few comments on the role of political philosophy as a medium of ‘narrative reconciliation’.     

Political Anti-Intentionalism

There has been little debate in political philosophy about whether the intentions of governments matter to the legitimacy of their policies. This paper fills this gap. First, I provide a rigorous statement of political anti-intentionalism, the view that intentions do not matter to political legitimacy. I do so by building on analogous debates in moral philosophy. Second, I sketch some strategies to defend political anti-intentionalism, which I argue are promising and available to a wide range of theories of legitimacy. Third, I show that the distinction has implications for debates surrounding neutrality and political liberalism.     

Freedom as Non-domination,Robustness, and Distant Threats

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - It is a core feature of the conception of freedom as non-domination that freedom requires the absence of exposure to arbitrary power across a range of relevant...     

Justification and legitimacy in global civil society

As some thinkers have sought in the concept of global civil society an ethically driven site of deliberation and even resistance, so others have criticized global civil society for its lack of legitimacy and representativeness. This article attempts to answer these criticisms – at least in part – by invoking a moral commitment to the value of justification. I argue that the idea of justification, when examined, offers us a particular understanding of legitimacy which would be attainable for global civil society actors. The article begins by setting out the case for concern about the legitimacy of global civil society. I then outline a certain understanding of justification, showing how a commitment to this conception provides both a response to critics of global civil society and an ethical baseline for humane actors within global civil society. I move on to trace the significance of the moral relevance of justification for actors' strategies. Lastly, however, I highlight the difficulty of justification in a diverse world. This is to say that the issues of legitimacy and strategy facing global civil society are only made more tractable, not dissolved, by an appeal to the importance of justification.     

Language,belief and plurality: a contribution to understanding religious diversity

My purpose in this paper is to defend the legitimacy of different religious systems by showing that they arise naturally as a consequence of the fact that we are linguistic beings. I will show that we do not need to presume that such belief systems all have something in common, and that even if they did we would most probably be unaware of it. I shall argue, however, that this lack of a common core does not mean that understanding between different belief systems is impossible, and that, in fact, a dialogue between them is possible without one system being reduced to another. I will defend these ideas through the use of some principles expounded in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, especially the world-picture concept.     

Aesthetic Testimony and the Norms of Belief Formation

Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non‐epistemic norm of belief formation. In this article I present an objection to unusability pessimism and argue that Robert Hopkins, the view's most prominent defender, fails to motivate adequately the claim that there are such non‐epistemic belief norms. The cases which putatively legitimize usability norms can be explained by appeal to more familiar norm types: epistemic norms of belief formation, and non‐epistemic norms which govern action other than belief formation. The intent of this article is not primarily negative, however, and I will also argue that understanding why the unusability position fails helps us to identify a promising new direction for the pessimist's opponents who wish to defend the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony.     

Liberal internationalism and global social justice

Theories of global justice have moved from issues relating to crimes against humanity and war crimes or, furthermore, ‘negative duties’ with respect to non-citizens, towards problems of distributive justice and global inequality. Thomas Nagel's Storrs Lectures from 2005, exemplifying Rawlsian internationalism, argue that liberal requirements concerning duties of distributive justice apply exclusively within a single nation-state, and do not extend to duties of this nature between rich and poor countries. Nagel even argues that the demand for global equality is not a demand of justice at all. In the present article I will try to offer a normative basis for the criticism of such a view. Following Kant and more recently Philip Pettit, I locate this normative basis on political freedom conceived as non-domination. Such a conception opens up the possibility of a political cosmopolitanism, which is based not on an empirical interdependence among people at a global level, but on a normative interdependence. Subsequent cosmopolitan duties extend both to the elimination of domination everywhere in the world and to the equal enjoyment of non-dominated choice. Thus, it will be argued that modern republicanism is falsely identified with a particular, bounded community, but supports a political, not simply a moral, cosmopolitanism. This kind of cosmopolitanism conceives of sovereign states neither as useless constructions, nor as mere instruments for realizing the pre-institutional value of justice among human beings. Instead, their existence is what gives the value of justice its application. Cosmopolitanism is not after all about the abolishment of all boundaries, but about the essential capacity to draw and redraw them infinitely under conditions of global justice.     

Priority setting in health care: on the relation between reasonable choices on the micro-level and the macro-level

There has been much discussion about how to obtain legitimacy at macro-level priority setting in health care by use of fair procedures, but how should we consider priority setting by individual clinicians or health workers at the micro-level? Despite the fact that just health care totally hinges upon their decisions, surprisingly little attention seems being paid to the legitimacy of these decisions. This paper addresses the following question: what are the conditions that have to be met in order to ensure that individual claims on health care are well aligned with an overall concept of just health care? Drawing upon a distinction between individual and aggregated needs, I argue that even though we assume the legitimacy of macro-level guidelines, this legitimacy is not directly transferable to decisions at micro-level simply by adherence to the guidelines’ recommendation. Further, I argue that individual claims are subject to the formal principle of equality and the demands of vertical and horizontal equity in a way that gives context- and patient-related equity concerns precedence over equity concerns captured at the macro-level. I conclude that if we aim to achieve just health care, we need to develop a complementary framework for legitimising individual judgment of patients’ claims on health care resources. Moreover, I suggest the basic structure of such a framework.     

Self-defence and National Defence [1]

ABSTRACT The paper begins with the suggestion that the aura of respectability that surrounds the notion of self-defence may render that notion suitable as a rallying point for agreement on the ethical legitimacy of warfare. I first argue that self-defensive killing by a person X is morally justified if three conditions obtain: (1) X is together with at least one other person in a situation in which one of the persons will be killed through actions of the other person(s); (2) X is not responsible for bringing about that situation; (3) unless X kills another person, X him- or herself will be killed. Next, I show that on the basis of this principle military operations are morally justified only if there are no alternatives to executing them that would save more lives or prevent the total loss of freedom for people. The paper concludes with the observation that the morality of individual self-defensive killing is unable to justify most of current national defence policies.     

Against Two Modest Conceptions of Hard Paternalism

People in our liberal pluralistic society have conflicting intuitions about the legitimacy of coercive hard paternalism, though respect for agency provides a common source of objection to it. The hard paternalist must give adequate reasons for her coercion which are acceptable to a free and equal agent. Coercion that fails to meet with an agent’s reasonable evaluative commitments is at least problematic and risks being authoritarian. Even if the coercer claims no normative authority over the coercee, the former still uses coercion to replace the latter’s reasons or will with his own reasons or will. But does every hard paternalistic view have to invite such objection? Throughout I will assume that defenders of what I will call “Neutral Paternalism” (NP) and “Commonsense Paternalism” (CP) aim to offer reasons for coercion all can reasonably endorse despite evaluative diversity, in opposition to more objectionable forms of coercive paternalism, such as those which defend it on religious or perfectionist grounds. I will argue, nonetheless, that Gerald Dworkin’s defense of NP and Danny Scoccia’s defense of CP succumb to the same problems of objectionable imposition that saddle other forms of coercive paternalism. The shortcomings in their views suggest that even modest hard paternalism is nonetheless problematic for liberals.