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Recognized rights as devices of public reason
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... As is common practice (see e.g. Boettcher 2021; G. Gaus 2009;Quong 2022;Tahzib 2022;Vallier 2016Vallier , 2018Wall 2022), we take public reason liberalism to be a general category that accommodates liberals whodespite their differencesendorse some version of the public justification requirement. Accordingly, thinkers such as John Rawls, Gerald Gaus and Jürgen Habermas count as public reason liberals even though they disagree on many other aspects. ...
How should the state justify its coercive rules? Public reason liberalism endorses a public justification requirement: Justifications offered for authoritative regulations must be acceptable to all members of the relevant public. However, as a criterion of legitimacy, the public justification requirement is epistemically unreliable: It prioritizes neither the exclusion of false beliefs nor the inclusion of true beliefs in justifications of political rules. This article presents an epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement. Employing epistemological theories of argumentation, we demonstrate how this approach enables assessing the epistemic quality of justifications of political rules, even when the truth is difficult to establish.
... 29 An earlier (Summer 2003) edition of that article, authored by D'Agostino only, was more open-ended on this point and noted the difficulty of understanding exactly in what sense public justification makes something 'the object of an agreement'). See also Gaus (2009). 30 That refers to Political Liberalism, where Rawls envisages a genuine consent. ...
Public justification-based accounts of liberal legitimacy rely on the idea that a polity’s basic structure should, in some sense, be acceptable to its citizens. In this paper I discuss the prospects of that approach through the lens of Gerald Gaus’ critique of John Rawls’ paradigmatic account of democratic public justification. I argue that Gaus does succeed in pointing out some significant problems for Rawls’ political liberalism; yet his alternative, justificatory liberalism, is not voluntaristic enough to satisfy the desiderata of a genuinely democratic theory of public justification. Moreover I contend that — pace Gaus — rather than simply amending political liberalism, the claims of justificatory liberalism cast serious doubts on the sustainability of the project of grounding liberal-democratic legitimacy through the idea of public justification.
This book poses the question: How can we organize society in such a way that our disagreement about facts and norms works to the benefit of everyone? In response, it makes the argument for polycentric democracy, a political arrangement consisting of various political units that enjoy different degrees of independence.
It is argued that to progress towards justice, we first need to change our attitude towards reasonable disagreement. Theorists have always viewed reasonable disagreement as nuisance, if not as a threat. However, this work puts forward that the diversity of perspectives which underlie reasonable disagreement should be viewed as a resource to be harvested rather than a threat to be tamed. Resting on two key arguments, the author proposes the idea of polycentric democracy as the most capable method of making pluralism productive. The book explores what such a political order might look like and concludes that only an institutional system which is capable of profiting from diversity, such as polycentric democracy, might reasonably be expected to generate an overlapping consensus.
Continuing in the tradition of Karl Popper and Friedrich August von Hayek, this book lies at the intersection of philosophy, political economy and political theory. It will be of great interest to academics and scholars working in philosophy, politics and economics.
Is public justification valuable because it contributes to some sort of community among citizens? Wendt distinguishes three different interpretations of that claim and argues that a ‘community of mutual moral accountability’ is indeed constituted by publicly justifiable moral rules. For that reason, public justification has constitutive value. Against Gerald Gaus
, he argues that this rationale for public justification cannot show that public justification should be conceived as a strictly necessary requirement for the moral justification of laws and moral rules. It should be conceived as one value among others.
In this chapter, Wendt discusses whether compromising for peace and public justification tends to establish liberal institutions (or even liberal institutions of a specific kind). There is some plausibility to the claim that liberal institutions, broadly conceived, form well-working modus vivendi arrangements. But modus vivendi arrangements need not take the form of liberal institutions, and hence compromises made for peace cannot always establish liberal institutions. It is also plausible that public justification rules out deeply illiberal institutions. But compromises made for public justification can lead to many different sorts of liberal institutions.
Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882) was White’s (sometimes Whyte’s) Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford; he held that chair (from 1878) until his sudden death at the age of 45. The publication of his major book-length treatises was posthumous.1 Nonetheless, Green’s reputation and his influence at the time of his death were considerable and continued so for years afterwards. But they had waned markedly by the time of the beginning of the 20th century and had dissipated by the end of the First World War in 1919.
This article argues that political philosophers for the most part have not successfully come to terms with the implications of the modern concept of property. It shows that the fragmentation of property is real and is not easily overcome. It begins in Section 2 by reviewing the bundle-of-rights approach. Section 3 examines several attempts to identify a normative or logical structure to these rights that preserves the classic conception of ownership. Section 4 presents an alternative conception of a regime of strong property rights that should be attractive to classical liberals yet avoids an appeal to the classic idea of ownership, accepting both Grey's fragmentation and the "no things" theses.
What is owed to others that I may not keep for myself? What may I keep for myself, even when others are in need? These transparently moral questions may immediately invite knee-jerk moralistic answers; or else be selfishly dismissed. And if we feel a tension between the duty to help others and what we want for ourselves, we might see it as a straightforward division between morally virtuous altruism and simple self-interest. Yet does morality really require us always to put those less fortunate before ourselves, our loved ones, even our own children, in every way? And does self-interest really offer a simple division between what is good for oneself and what is good for others? Such questions are of great importance in both moral and political theory. They are in the first place substantive questions regarding the demands that the needs and interests of others place upon us, but they broaden out into more abstract questions about the impartiality of ethical reasoning itself. A central question for this volume is whether impartiality and partiality are really opposed dimensions or if they can be harmoniously reconciled in one picture. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, the chapters in this volume explore such issues as the demandingness of morality, the nature of value and reasons, practical reasoning, and the fundamental nature of morality itself.
The “welcome return” to “substantive political philosophy” that Rawls's A Theory of Justice was said to herald has resulted in forty years of proposals seeking to show that philosophical reflection leads to the demonstrable truth of almost every and any conceivable view of the justice of property rights. Select any view—from the justice of unregulated capitalist markets to the most extreme forms of egalitarianism—and one will find that some philosophers have proclaimed that rational reflection uniquely leads to its justice. This is, I believe, a sort of ideological thinking masquerading as philosophizing. In this paper, using some tools from game theory as well as experimental findings, I seek to sketch a non-ideological approach to the question of the justification of property rights. On this approach the aim of political philosophy is, first and foremost, to reflect on whether our social rules of property are within the “optimal eligible set” of rules acceptable to all.
In his book, The Idea of Justice , Amartya Sen presents a criticism of what he calls «the transcendental theory of justice». There he argues that transcendental theories play an irrelevant role in identifying the right choices to fight injustice in a non-ideal world. In this work we explore a possible relationship of compatibility between the comparative approach sponsored by Sen and a minimal framework of global justice that would play a role in constraining the comparative process in order to avoid path-dependent choices that bring about institutional scenarios that are incompatible with the conceptions of justice that generated the original evaluations.
En su obra The Idea of Justice , Amartya Sen expone una crítica a lo que denomina «teoría transcendental de la justicia», argumentando que su papel resulta irrelevante para guiar las acciones requeridas para combatir la injusticia en condiciones no-ideales. En este trabajo exploramos una posible relación de compatibilidad entre el enfoque comparativo auspiciado por Sen y un marco mínimo transcendental de justicia global que constriña las elecciones para evitar trayectorias institucionales que desemboquen en escenarios incompatibles con las concepciones de justicia que generaron las evaluaciones originales.
Learning to take turns in repeated game situations is a robust phenomenon in both laboratory experiments and in everyday life. Nevertheless, it has received little attention in recent studies of learning dynamics in games. We investigate the simplest and most obvious extension of fictitious play to a learning rule that can recognize patterns, and show how players using this rule can spontaneously learn to take turns.
This essay critically examines three theories of moral rights, theBenefit, the Interest, and the Choice theories. The Interest andChoice theories attempt to explain how rights can be more robustthan seems possible on the Benefit theory. In particular, moralrights are supposed to be resistant to trade-offs to supportprincipled anti-paternalism, to constitute a distinct dimensionof morality, and to provide right holders with a range ofdiscretionary choice. I argue that these and other featuresare better yet provided by a fourth theory of moral rights, theJurisdiction theory.
In this essay I dispute the widely held view that utility theory and decision theory are formalizations of instrumental rationality. I show that the decision theoretic framework has no deep problems accommodating the “reasonable” qua a preference to engage in fair cooperation as such. All evaluative criteria relevant to choice can be built into a von Neumann‐Morgenstern utility function. I focus on the claim that, while rational choice‐driven agents are caught in the Pareto‐inferior outcome, reasonable agents could “solve” the PD and cooperate. Not so, I argue. If reasonable people find themselves in PD situations they too would follow the dominant “defect” strategy. The difference between instrumentally rational agents and those who are also reasonable is not that they would behave differently in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, but that reasonable people are more successful at avoiding the Prisoner’s Dilemma and tend to play more cooperative games.
I argue that Isaiah Berlin’s pluralistic liberalism is best interpreted as a sophisticated form of liberal rationalism, as Berlin himself suggests. His value pluralism, even if it is viewed (as his critics typically view it, with considerable justification) as claiming that any choice between conflicting incommensurable values cannot be a rational choice, does not subvert his liberalism. Rather, this agonistic pluralism emanates from his liberal rationalism, which pictures reason as too weak to resolve conflicts of incommensurables. Yet, reason remains strong enough to discover that certain basic liberal values, including those associated with some minimum core of equal rights, are far more important than any competing values created by mankind. Berlin apparently sees his pluralistic liberal rationalism as a genuine rationalism that, in stark contrast to mainstream utopian rationalisms which wildly exaggerate the power of reason, makes suitable room for the valid insights provided by the romantics.
T. H. Green claimed that ‘rights are made by recognition. There is no right but thinking makes it so’. This ‘rights recognition thesis’ is widely rejected. I argue in this article that, so far from being an idiosyncratic doctrine of 19th-century British Idealism, the rights recognition thesis implies a compelling conception of rights, and one that, surprisingly, is more in tune with contemporary meta-ethics than are many contemporary rights theories. Green's moral theory, I argue, is a form of the widely embraced doctrine of ‘moral internalism’. Such internalism, conjoined with a generally embraced analysis of rights, leads to some version of the rights recognition thesis.
In this paper, we consider the Coase theorem in a non cooperative game framework. In particular, we explore the robustness of the Coase theorem with respect to the ?nal distribution of alienable property rights which constitutes, as far as we know, a less cultivated ?eld of research. In our framework, in order to reach e� ciency, agents have to stipulate binding contracts. In the analysis, we distinguish between permanent and temporary contracts showing the di�erent implication of the two kinds of contracts with respect to the ?nal attribution of individual rights. More precisely, we show that, with temporary binding contracts and under particular assumptions, the ?nal attribution if individual rights does not converge.
The Diversity of Comprehensive Liberalisms " in The Handbook of Political Theory
- As
As I have argued in " The Diversity of Comprehensive Liberalisms " in The Handbook of Political Theory, Gerald F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas, eds. (London: Sage, 2004): 100–114.
On Liberty in The Collected Works of
- John See
- Stuart
See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, J.M. Robson, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), vol. 18: chap. 1, ¶1.
This is not to claim that a de jure authority must be de facto authority; that is a significantly stronger claim
- Ibid
Ibid. 47. This is not to claim that a de jure authority must be de facto authority; that is a significantly stronger claim.
Maximization and the Act of Choice " is his Rationality and Freedom
- See Amartya
- Sen
See Amartya Sen, " Maximization and the Act of Choice " is his Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002): 158–205.