On the many as one: A reply to Kornhauser and Sager

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 377-390

  List, Christian ^a   Pettit, Philip ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645128195     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2005.00037.x     Document Type: Note

References (45)

1. Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager,"The Many as One: Integrity and Group Choice in Paradoxical Cases, "Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2004): 249-76.
2. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
3. Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager, "Unpacking the Court," Yale Law Journal 96(1986): 82-117
4. "Modelling Collegial Courts. I. Path-Dependence, "International Review of Law and Economics 12(1992): 169-85
5. "Modelling Collegial Courts. II. Legal Doctrine," Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 8 (1992): 441-70.
6. We do not suggest that majority voting on every proposition is the best decision method here. In fact, we suggest below that giving up propositionwise majority voting may be necessary for the achievement of integrity.
7. Formally, by the "background legal doctrine" we mean the proposition that the defendant is liable if and only if there was harm done by the defendant and the defendant had a duty of care. This background legal doctrine is treated as exogenously fixed in the present example.
8. Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One."
9. Philip Pettit, "Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma, " Philosophical Issues (supplement to Nous) 11(2001): 268-99.
10. Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Cambridge and New York: Polity and Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 5. For more detail, see Philip Pettit, "Groups with Minds of their Own," in Socializing Metaphysics, ed. Frederick Schmitt (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 172-75. Philip Pettit, "Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma, and Republican Theory," in Philosophy, Politics and Society Vol. 7: Debating Deliberative Democracy, ed. James Fishkin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 138-62. Kornhauser and Sager refer to "Groups with Minds of their Own," but still accuse Pettit of ignoring the diachronic perspective and of differing in this respect from Dworkin.
11. Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One,"p. 252.
12. Crucially, the majority judgments in Table1 are not inconsistent by themselves. They are inconsistent only if it is accepted in addition that the defendant is liable if and only if there was harm done by the defendant and the defendant had a duty of care. By contrast, the majority judgments in Table2 below are inconsistent by themselves (in the standard sense of propositional logic).
13. Christian List and Philip Pettit, "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result, "Economics and Philosophy 18 (2002): 89-110.
14. Christian List and Philip Pettit, "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: Two Impossibility Results Compared," Synthese 140 (2004): 207-35.
15. Christian List, "A Possibility Theorem on Aggregation over Multiple Interconnected Propositions," Mathematical Social Sciences 45 (2003): 1-13
16. "A Model of Path Dependence in Decisions over Multiple Propositions," American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 495-513.
17. Pettit, "Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma."See also List and Pettit, "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result."
18. A set of propositions is 'nontrivially interrelated'if it is of one of the following forms (or a superset thereof): (i) it includes k > 1 propositions 'p 1 ' ⋯ 'p k 'and either their conjunction 'p 1 and ⋯ and p k 'or their disjunction 'p 1 or p 2 or ⋯ or p k 'or both (and the negations of all these propositions); (ii) it includes k > 1 propositions 'p 1 ',⋯, 'p k ', another proposition 'q'and either the proposition 'q if and only if (p 1 and ⋯ and p k) 'or the proposition 'q if and only if (p 1 or p 2 or ⋯ or p k) 'or both (and negations); (iii) it includes propositions 'p', 'q'and 'if p then q'(and negations). This definition is given in List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason."For more general definitions of nontrivial interrelation, see Dietrich and List, "Arrow's Theorem in Judgment Aggregation."
19. An individual's judgments on the relevant propositions are consistent if the set of propositions accepted by the individual is a consistent set in the standard sense of propositional logic; an individual's judgments are complete if, for every relevant proposition, the individual accepts either the proposition or its negation. The consistency and completeness of collective judgments is defined in the same way.
20. Here it can be shown that, if a group seeks to achieve integrity in its judgments over time, these judgments may be path dependent, that is, dependent on the order in which propositions are considered. List, "A Model of Path-Dependence in Decisions over Multiple Propositions." Ironically, as noted above, Kornhauser and Sager suggest that their approach goes beyond Pettit, whom they accuse of focusing on "synchronic, reason-based" issues (Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One," p. 255). In taking this line, they ignore the insistence in several texts, including the one on which they rely, that the problem is diachronic as well as synchronic and that it does not require the prior privileging of premises. See Pettit, A Theory of Freedom, chap. 5; Pettit, "Groups with Minds of Their Own" List and Pettit, "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result."
21. A survey of several relevant technical results and their implications for different philosophical accounts of collective decision making is given in List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason."
22. Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One,"p. 256; in fairness, they specifically address the issue of what they call-misleadingly, as we see it-"reason-based integrity."
23. Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One," p. 256. They argue in this case, congenially, that no normative commitments should generally be privileged in such a way that, regardless of the specific decision in question and their implications for that decision, revision is ruled out. We agree with this last point, of course, believing like Kornhauser and Sager in Rawls's reflective equilibrium; we can readily accommodate the point, since by our analysis the failure of consistency is the primary problem raised in paradoxical cases, not the rejection of any doctrinal prioritizing of reasons.
24. Dworkin, Law's Empire, p. 167.
25. Lewis Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, "Mind 4(1895): 278-80.
26. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford USiversity Press, 1975): sect. 26. See also Pettit, A Theory of Freedom, who draws on Carole Rovane, The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
27. Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One,"p. 258.
28. For a discussion of truth-tracking for the 'right'and 'wrong reasons', see
29. Philip Pettit and Wlodzimierz Rabinowicz, "Appendix to 'Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma,'" Philosophical Issues 11(2001): 268-99
30. Luc Bovens and Wlodzimierz Rabinowicz, "Complex Collective Decisions: An Epistemic Perspective, "Associations 7(2003): 37-50
31. Christian List, "The Probability of Inconsistencies in Complex Collective Decisions, " Social Choice and Welfare 24(2005): 3-32.
32. See Pettit, "Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma, and Republican Theory."Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One,"take the case of the legislature and focus, not on the general question, but rather on the specific question of how far a legislature might conduct its business on the basis of "reason-based voting."Unsurprisingly, and surely correctly, they are pessimistic about the possibility of getting a legislature to accommodate its decision making to such a procrustean mold.
33. List and Pettit, "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result."List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason."
34. For a discussion of different types of incomplete agreements in this context, see List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason."
35. For technical results, see List, "A Model of Path Dependence in Decisions over Multiple Propositions" and "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason." The route is also defended in
36. Bruce Chapman, "Rational Aggregation, "Politics, Philosophy and Economics 1(2002): 337-54.
37. For technical results, see List, "A Possibility Theorem on Aggregation over Multiple Interconnected Propositions."An informal discussion is given in
38. List, "Two Concepts of Agreement," The Good Society 11(2002): 72-79.
39. Joseph P. Canning, "Ideas of the State in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Commentators on the Roman Law," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 1-27.
40. See Philip Pettit, "Rawls's Peoples,"in Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia, ed. Rex Martin and David Reidy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
41. Kornhauser and Sager, "The Many as One,"p. 252.
42. Pettit, A Theory of Freedom, chap. 7, and Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
43. Dworkin, Law's Empire, p. 165.
44. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
45. See also List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason."