The indeterminacy of Republican policy

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 67-93

  McMahon, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33845389980     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2005.00025.x     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. viii. Parenthetical page references in the main text are to this volume. 2. Pettit says: "I maintain that the traditional, republican ideal of freedom supports and unifies a compelling manifesto of political demands, and that if a state and a society looks after the freedom as non-domination of its members, then most other desiderata will look after themselves"(p. 7). 3. Pettit notes (pp. 43, 66-67) that in the eighteenth century it was customary to distinguish civil liberty from natural liberty, understood as the liberty that one would have in a state of nature. The point is clearest in the case of the Hobbesian state of nature. 4. In
2. "Domination: A Preliminary Analysis, "The Monist 84 (2001): 98-112,
3. A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Pettit defines common avowable interests on pp. 156-58. He says that an interest is avowable if it is conscious or can be brought to consciousness without great effort, and that it is common "just so far as cooperatively admissible considerations support its collective provision."Drawing on Habermas, he defines cooperatively admissible considerations as "those that anyone in discourse with others about what they should jointly or collectively provide can adduce without embarrassment as relevant matters to take into account"(p. 156). Pettit's aim in this book is to offer a single theory of freedom capable of supporting an account both of a free person and of a free polity. He argues that freedom should be understood as fitness to be held responsible, where this in turn is constituted by what he calls "discursive control."This formulation makes explicit the normative character of the freedom with which Pettit is concerned. Discursive control is the control one has when one's thought and action are responsive to the relevant reasons, that is, when they unfold the way they ought to, and when others influence one's thought and action only by providing relevant reasons (that is, as co-reasoners). Pettit says that ascribing discursive control is ascribing a certain kind of relational power: "The person not only receives from others the gift of being treated as a discursive subject, they have an effectively implemented claim to such treatment. They not only receive recognition and respect, they command the recognition and respect they receive"(p. 79). The political implications of this way of understanding freedom, developed in chapters 6 and 7, are the same as those that, in Republicanism, Pettit extracts from the idea of freedom as nondomination. 6. Charles Larmore, "A Critique of Philip Pettit's Republicanism,"in Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy: Philosophical Issues 11, ser. ed. Ernest Sosa and Enrique Villanueva (Boston and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001): 229-43. 7. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 137. 8.
4. John Christman, Ethics 109 (1998): 202-06.
5. For discussion of this point, see David Estlund, "Making Truth Safe for Democracy,"in The Idea of Democracy, ed. D. Copp, J. Hampton, and J. Roemer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 71-100. 10. "[T]he value of such democracy is not contingent on the possibility that people will generally achieve a high degree of consensus about the matters that have to be decided in parliament, in the executive, or in the judiciary. Even if there is no imminent consensus on offer in such areas, it remains the case that effective contestability requires that the decisions should be made on the basis of reasoned deliberation"(p. 190). 11. In A Theory of Freedom, after defining the notion of a common avowable interest, Pettit states that as he understands this notion, there is a fact of the matter about what such interests support. He responds to the objection that they will often seem to support rival initiatives equally well by saying that "in many situations there will always be a further co-operatively admissible consideration available: Viz., that everyone is worse off not agreeing at all than agreeing on one or the other of the rival schemes and that some measure ought to be adopted, therefore, to break the tie"(p. 157). He mentions tossing a coin, adjudication, and voting by the electorate or a legislature. Later he distinguishes "authorial"and "editorial"dimensions of democracy-the former generating a set of policy alternatives, the latter pruning it-and associates the authorial dimension with electoral institutions (pp. 160-63). 12. I discuss conflicts of this sort among reasons, and the ways they might be resolved, in Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially ch. 2, 5, and 7. One point I make is that the parties may be able to reduce such conflicts by "bending"the reasons and values in play. This idea is explored further in
6. Henry Richardson's "Long as You Love Me, It's Alright? "Philosophical Studies 116/2 (2003): 183-95,
7. For an account of reasonable disagreement, see Charles Larmore, "Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement,"in his The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 152-74. Larmore suggests that reasonable disagreement is possible because the set of things that can be the object of reasonable belief is larger than the set of things that can be the object of reasonable agreement. In his view, reasonable disagreement, not pluralism, is the defining feature of a liberal society. He says, "The insight that has proven so significant for liberal thought is that reasonableness has ceased to seem a guarantee of ultimate agreement about deep questions concerning how we should live"(p. 168). 14. Pettit is somewhat confusing on the topic of the extent of nondomination. When what is at issue is the compromising of freedom as nondomination, we can distinguish the intensity of domination and its extent. Pettit believes that we can move toward a determinate conclusion about what is necessary to reduce the compromising of freedom as nondomination because what reduces domination in one area will tend to reduce it in others. He also, however, speaks of the extent of non dominated choice. Here the issue concerns the conditioning, in contrast to the compromising, of freedom as nondomination. Pettit suggests that in a republican polity, reducing the compromising of freedom as nondomination will have something like lexicographical priority over reducing the conditioning of it. The state should first "remove or reduce all actual domination,"including any domination for which it may be responsible, then seek to maximize the range of nondominated choice (p. 106). 15. This point is germane to an objection to Pettit's republicanism that John Ferejohn makes in
8. "Pettit's Republic, "The Monist 84 (2001): 113-30.
9. The argument here is relevant to Pettit's observations about the role of civil society in a republican polity. In a case where reasonable people can disagree, a particular practice may nevertheless have become established in civil society. But unless the process by which it became established has the relevant attributes of contestatory democracy, the practice cannot be supposed to represent a public standard of nonarbitrariness the way a decision made at the political level by contestatory procedures can. The practice will give people social, but not normative, power. This raises doubts about the extent to which norms of civil society can supplement republican government (pp. 241-46). The norms of civil society may not accord with a decision that is made by contestatory democratic procedures. If so, they must give way. Only decisions made by contestatory procedures can serve as a public standard of nonarbitrariness in cases where reasonable disagreement is possible. The most that can be said, in such cases, is that if norms of civil society subsequently form around a decision made by contestatory democratic procedures-or these norms simply support obeying the law, whatever it is-informal social pressures may relieve the government of some of the burden of creating the immunity to arbitrary interference that freedom as nondomination requires. 17. It should be emphasized that this argument does not purport to vindicate employment at will. The claim is not that giving employers the right to hire and fire for any reason (or no reason) can be justified by reference to the common avowable interests. The discretion of employers is limited to choices that can be defended as profit maximizing. 18. For an overview of classical republican theory, especially in England, that emphasizes this theme, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19. This line of resistance to my argument was suggested by an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, who supplied the quote in the text. 20. For an alternative to Pettit's explanation of the failure of classical republicanism to survive the expansion of the citizenry, and some skepticism about whether times are now more propitious for the republican project, see
10. Gurpreet Rattan, "Prospects for a Contemporary Republicanism, "The Monist 84 (2001): 113-30.