Freedom as Non‐Domination and Widespread Prejudice

This paper offers an answer to an objection to Phillip Pettit’s neo‐republican account of freedom as non‐domination raised by Sharon Krause. The objection is that widespread prejudice, such as systemic racism or sexism, generates significant obstacles to individuals’ free agency but that neo‐republicanism fails to explain why these obstacles reduce freedom. This is because neo‐republicanism defines domination in terms of the capacity for arbitrary interference, but many prejudiced actions do not involve physical coercion, threats, or any other behavior typically described as types of interference. The paper discusses three strategies to account for the impact of widespread prejudice on the domination of groups. It argues that the most plausible strategy redefines domination in terms of behavior that is prima facie wrong and lacks appropriate checks. Such behavior includes interference but also includes prejudiced actions, such as failing to select the most qualified candidate for a job.     

Intimacy,Autonomy and (Non) Domination

Accounts of autonomy which acknowledge the importance of non‐domination – that is, of being structurally protected against arbitrary interference with one's life – face an apparent problem with regards to intimate relationships (whether romantic or otherwise). By their very nature, such relations open us up to psychological and material suffering that would not be possible absent the particular relationship; even worse, from the non‐domination point of view, is that this vulnerability seems to be structural in a way exactly analogous to (for example) workplace or social domination. If being powerless to prevent an employer causing me harm constitutes domination at work, then what relevant differences can support the intuition that being powerless to prevent my partner causing me comparable pain is not autonomy‐hostile? I argue for the reassuring view that the obligations and possibility of pain arising from such relations aren't necessarily dominating; they would be so only if we believed that any obligation we have not explicitly agreed to is a restriction on our autonomy, and that is false. I conclude with a note of caution: even though intimate relations aren't necessarily dominating, they will often be contingently so if they take place in a wider social context of domination – such as that which we currently inhabit.     

Is Neo‐Republicanism Bad for Women?

The republican revival in political philosophy, political theory, and legal theory has produced an impressive range of novel interpretations of the historical figures of the republican tradition. It has also given rise to a variety of contemporary neo‐republican theories that build on its historical themes. Although there have been some feminist discussions of its historical representatives, neo‐republicanism has not generated a great deal of enthusiasm among feminists. The present paper examines Phillip Pettit's theory of freedom as nondomination in order to assess its potential usefulness for those with feminist goals. It defends Pettit's account of interpersonal domination from certain feminist objections, but argues that his account of state domination needs to be amended if it is fully to protect the interests of women and other groups.     

GEORGES BATAILLE'S MYSTICAL CRUELTY

In this reply to Kent Brintnall's response to my essay on Georges Bataille and the ethics of ecstasy, I explore two primary questions: whether instrumentalization is inherently violent and non‐instrumentalization is inherently non‐violent, and whether there is a way to intervene in the world that avoids both “apathetic disengagement” and domination. I endorse the view that instrumentalization can be good as well as bad, and I suggest that it is possible to strive to intervene in the world without striving to master it. I make reference to Sarah Coakley as a Christian theologian who advances particular practices that aim for non‐dominating intervention in theworld.     

Democracy,Tolerance, Aquinas

Democracy is more than a collection of institutions, laws, and freely contested sources of authority. It is also an ideal. If we think of this ideal in republican terms, in terms of resistance to domination through the practices of mutual accountability, and if we recall that democratic life invariably comes with loss, then those of us who inhabit a democratic political society will need to locate, and then cultivate, responses to loss that do not undermine our commitment to this ideal. Tolerance, one such response, is widely recognized and yet poorly theorized. Thomas Aquinas did not recognize it, but he did praise and endorse its act, toleration, and he does offer resources for bringing the virtue into focus and identifying some of the distinguishing features of its democratic variant.     

Towards a ‘Non‐Ideal’ Non‐Ideal Theory

This article explores the role that considerations about the feasibility of a political proposal should play at the levels of both ideal and non‐ideal theory. Drawing on recent work in the literature on political feasibility, I begin by describing a ‘constraint‐based’ view of ideal and non‐ideal theory, with feasibility considerations serving different functions depending on whether they are operating at the ideal or non‐ideal level. Taking feasibility seriously at either level presents us with at least two important challenges. Firstly, we need principles which enable us to weigh the value of a proposal's feasibility against its other normatively significant properties, and against those of alternative proposals. Secondly, we need the capacity to gauge the nature of the epistemic constraints which apply to our feasibility assessments themselves. In response to these problems, I propose a ‘narrowing‐down’ approach, focused on developing our capacities to make accurate and reliable judgements about the feasibility of political proposals.     

Evaluating Fund Performance by Compromise Programming with Linear‐Quadratic Composite Metric: An Actual Case on The CaixaBank in Spain

This paper proposes an additive measure on the basis of compromise programming to evaluate fund performance from multiple criteria, of which the most usual are profitability and risk. This proposal is motivated by the fact that compromise programming is a sound decision support model to obtain scores of alternatives by minimizing weighted distances to an ideal point, the weights reflecting the investor's preferences for the criteria. To define the distance objective function, the linear‐quadratic composite metric is used, which combines advantages of linear and non‐linear objective functions. A critical advantage of compromise programming for fund performance evaluation is that the model can be extended to more than two financial criteria while other measures currently used (either ratio‐based or leverage‐based measures) only consider two criteria, say, profitability and risk. In the application, three investor's profiles are defined, which involve different weighting systems and lead to different fund rankings. These rankings are compared with domination relationships, the latter formulating if a fund is dominated or non‐dominated by convex combinations of other funds. Numerical tables are provided with data, computational process and results, which are analysed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Slaves,Prisoners, and Republican Freedom

Philip Pettit’s republican conception of freedom is presented as an alternative both to negative and positive conceptions of freedom. The basic idea is to conceptualize freedom as non-domination, not as non-interference or self-mastery. When compared to negative freedom, Pettit’s republican conception comprises two controversial claims: the claim that we are unfree if we are dominated without actual interference, and the claim that we are free if we face interference without domination. Because the slave is a widely accepted paradigm of the unfree person, the case of a slave with a non-interfering master is often cited as providing a good argument for the first republican claim and against a negative conception of freedom. One aim of this article is to raise doubts about whether this is true. The other aim of the article is to show that the prisoner—also a paradigm of the unfree person—presents a good argument against the second republican claim and in favour of a negative conception of freedom. This is called the ‘prisoner-argument’. It will be argued that neither Pettit’s distinction between free persons and free choices nor his distinction between compromising and conditioning factors of freedom can help to rebut the charge of the prisoner-argument.     

Exploitation as Domination: A Response to Arneson

In a recent paper in this journal, Richard Arneson criticizes the domination account of exploitation and attributes it to me and Allen Wood. In this paper, I defend the domination account against Arneson's criticisms. I begin by showing that the domination view is distinct from the vulnerability‐based view defended by Wood. I also show that Alan Wertheimer's influential account of exploitation is congenial to the domination view. I then argue that Arneson's own fairness‐based view of exploitation generates false negatives and trivializes the concept of exploitation, rendering it entirely parasitic on the notion of unfairness.     

A Republican Housewife: Marie‐Jeanne Phlipon Roland on Women's Political Role

In this paper I look at the philosophical (and sometimes personal) struggles of one eighteenth‐century woman writer to reconcile a desire and obvious capacity to participate in the creation of republican ideals and their applications on the one hand, and on the other a deeply held belief that women's role in a republic is confined to the domestic realm. I argue that Marie‐Jeanne Phlipon Roland's philosophical writings—three unpublished essays, published and unpublished letters, as well as parts of her memoirs—suggest that even though she adopted a Rousseau‐style rural republicanism that relies on complementarity of men and women's virtues, she somehow succeeds in proposing a less sexist picture of the republican family, one that makes it possible for men and women to take an equal part in family business and politics.     

Revising Republican Liberty: What is the Difference Between a Disinterested Gentle Giant and a Deterred Criminal?

This paper assesses the most well thought out contemporary conception of republican liberty put forward by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. I demonstrate that it is incoherent: at least insofar as it seeks to pick out a form of unfreedom not captured by the negative conception of liberty. This incoherence arises because Pettit and Skinner cannot both hold that republican unfreedom is defined by one agent’s mere capacity to interfere arbitrarily with another agent and, at the same time, claim that republican freedom can be promoted by deterrence mechanisms. My contribution to contemporary republican theory is to suggest that a coherent republican conception can be achieved, however, through an important revision. This is to replace Pettit and Skinner’s antonym of republican liberty—the power to interfere arbitrarily—with a higher order power—the power to determine arbitrarily rules with respect to interference. This revised conception does pick out a genuinely distinct extension of unfreedom from the negative liberty conception. I believe it also reflects an important intuitive sense in which we may understand ourselves to be unfree, that is, to live under the rule of another.     

Ideal and Non‐ideal Theory and the Problem of Knowledge

This article analyses a hitherto neglected problem at the transition from ideal to non‐ideal theory: the problem of knowledge. Ideal theories often make idealising assumptions about the availability of knowledge, for example knowledge of social scientific facts. This can lead to problems when this knowledge turns out not to be available at the non‐ideal level. Knowledge can be unavailable in a number of ways: in principle, for practical reasons, or because there are normative reasons not to use it. This can make it necessary to revise ideal theories, because the principle of ‘ought implies can’ rules out certain theories, at least insofar as they are understood as action‐guiding. I discuss a number of examples and argue that there are two tendencies that will increase the relevance of this problem in the future: the availability of large amounts of sensitive data whose use is problematic from a normative point of view, and the increasing complexity of an interrelated world that makes it harder to predict the effects of institutional changes. To address these issues, philosophers need to cooperate with social scientists and philosophers of the social sciences. Normative theorising can then be understood as one step in a long process that includes thinkers from different disciplines. Ideal theory can respond to many of the charges raised against it if it is understood along these lines and if it takes the problem of knowledge and its implications seriously.     

Moral Hedging and Responding to Reasons

In this paper, I argue that the fetishism objection to moral hedging fails. The objection rests on a reasons‐responsiveness account of moral worth, according to which an action has moral worth only if the agent is responsive to moral reasons. However, by adopting a plausible theory of non‐ideal moral reasons, one can endorse a reasons‐responsiveness account of moral worth while maintaining that moral hedging is sometimes an appropriate response to moral uncertainty. Thus, the theory of moral worth upon which the fetishism objection relies does not, in fact, support that objection.     

Is Corporal Punishment Torturous?

The aim of this article is to determine whether fixed courses of judicial corporal punishment (JCP) and non‐abusive corporal punishment of children (CPC) amount to torture. I assess the reasons that have been offered for distinguishing fixed courses of JCP from torture and argue that none is successful. I argue that non‐consensual JCP that inflicts severe pain is appropriately classifiable as torture, but that JCP that inflicts mild pain and entirely consensual JCP are not torturous. I consider whether any of the reasons offered for distinguishing JCP from torture can distinguish non‐abusive CPC from torture given certain important differences between CPC and JCP. I submit that none of these reasons is successful. I consider other possible reasons for distinguishing non‐abusive CPC that inflicts severe pain from torture and argue that none is successful. I conclude that fixed courses of non‐consensual JCP which inflict severe pain and non‐abusive CPC that inflicts severe pain are correctly classifiable as torture.     

Non‐Ideal Theorizing,Social Groups,and Knowledge of Oppression: A Response

In responding to Anderson, Tobin, and Mills, I focus on questions about non‐ideal theory, normative individualism, and standpoint theory. In particular, I ask whether feminist theorizing can be “liberal” and yet not embody the problematic forms of abstraction and individualism described in Challenging Liberalism. Ultimately, I call for methods of theorizing that illuminate and challenge oppressive social hierarchies.     

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.     

Han Feizi��s Thought and Republicanism

Han Feizi’s philosophy is usually represented as an amoral autocracy where the ruler is the sole political power and runs the state by controlling the people through rewards and punishments. While his system is formally autocratic, this article argues that the purpose behind this system bears some similarity to the republican political ideal of non-domination. In this interpretation, Han Feizi makes the ruler the sole power to mitigate the danger of the state being dominated by ministers. He does not employ republican institutions, but attempts to discourage the ruler from using his power capriciously in order to increase order and security in the state, which are his ultimate political values. Han Feizi is not a republican, but this similarity suggests that when revised for today’s very different circumstances, Han Feizian philosophy’s focus on impartial law can make a contribution to contemporary Chinese political thought.     

Contractualism for Us As We Are

A difficult problem for contractualists is how to provide an interpretation of the contractual situation that is both subject to appropriately stringent constraints and yet also appropriately sensitive to certain features of us as we actually are. My suggestion is that we should embrace a model of contractualism that is structurally analogous to the “advice model” of the ideal observer theory famously proposed by Michael Smith (1994, 1995). An advice model of contractualism is appealing since it promises to deliver a straightforward solution to the so‐called “conditional fallacy.” But it faces some formidable challenges. On the face of it, it seems to be straightforwardly conceptually incoherent. And it seems to deliver a solution to the conditional fallacy at the cost of being vulnerable to what I shall call “the concessional fallacy.” I shall consider how, if at all, these challenges are to be met. I shall then conclude by considering what this might mean for the so‐called “ideal/non‐ideal theory” issue.     

Better Living Through Chemistry? A Reply to Savulescu and Persson on ‘Moral Enhancement’

In ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom, and the God Machine’, Savulescu and Persson argue that recent scientific findings suggest that there is a realistic prospect of achieving ‘moral enhancement’ and respond to Harris's criticism that this would threaten individual freedom and autonomy. I argue that although some pharmaceutical and neuro‐scientific interventions may influence behaviour and emotions in ways that we may be inclined to evaluate positively, describing this as ‘moral enhancement’ presupposes a particular, contested account, of what it is to act morally and implies that entirely familiar drugs such as alcohol, ecstasy, and marijuana are also capable of making people ‘more moral’. Moreover, while Savulescu and Persson establish the theoretical possibility of using drugs to promote autonomy, the real threat posed to freedom by ‘moral bioenhancement’ is that the ‘enhancers’ will be wielding power over the ‘enhanced’. Drawing on Pettit's notion of ‘freedom as non‐domination’, I argue that individuals may be rendered unfree even by a hypothetical technology such as Savulescu and Persson's ‘God machine’, which would only intervene if they chose to act immorally. While it is impossible to rule out the theoretical possibility that moral enhancement might be all‐things‐considered justified even where it did threaten freedom and autonomy, I argue that any technology for biomedical shaping of behaviour and dispositions is much more likely to be used for ill rather than good.     

Equality as Comparative Fairness

The goal of this article is modest. It is simply to help illuminate the nature of egalitarianism. More particularly, I aim to show what certain egalitarians are committed to, and to suggest that equality, as these egalitarians understand it, is an important normative ideal that cannot simply be ignored in moral deliberations. In doing this, I distinguish between equality as universality, equality as impartiality, and equality as comparability, and also between instrumental and non‐instrumental egalitarianism. I then characterise the version of egalitarianism with which I am concerned, which I call equality as comparative fairness. I discuss the relations between equality, fairness, luck, and responsibility, and defend egalitarianism against rival views that focus on subsistence, sufficiency, or compassion. I also defend egalitarianism against the Levelling Down and Raising Up Objections, and present several key examples to illustrate egalitarianism's distinct appeal, in contrast to prioritarianism's. I conclude by considering two common questions about my view: first, whether my ultimate concern is really with comparative fairness, rather than equality, so that my view is not, in fact, a substantive, non‐instrumental version of egalitarianism, and second, whether my view ultimately reduces to a theory about desert.