Inhalt: TEIL I Dominik SCHMIDIG: Sprachliche Vermittlung philosophischer Einsichten nach Fichtes Frühphilosophie. Thomas Sören HOFFMANN: Die Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre und das Problem der Sprache bei Fichte. Jere Paul SURBER: Fichtes Sprachphilosophie und der Begriff einer Wissenschaftslehre. Holger JERGIUS: Fichtes »geometrische« Semantik. TEIL II Günter MECKENSTOCK: Beobachtungen zur Methodik in Fichtes Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. Hartmut TRAUB: Wege zur Wahrheit. Zur Bedeutung von Fichtes wissenschaftlich- und populär-philosophischer Methode. Jürgen STAHL: System und Methode - Zur methodologischen Begründung transzendentalen Philosophierens in (...) Fichtes »Begriffsschrift«. Kunihiko NAGASAWA: Eine neue Möglichkeit der Philosophie nach der Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. Teil III Katsuaki OKADA: Der erste Grundsatz und die Bildlehre. Hisang RYUE: Die Differenz zwischen »Ich bin« und «Ich bin Ich«. Christian KLOTZ: Der Ichbegriff in Fichtes Erörterung der Substantialität. Alois K. SOLLER: Fichtes Lehre vom Anstoß. Nicht-Ich und Ding an sich in der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Eine kritische Erörterung. Heinz EIDAM: Fichtes Anstoß. Anmerkungen zu einem Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre von 1794. Virginia LÓPEZ-DOMÍNGUEZ: Die Deduktion des Gefühls in der Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. Reinhard LOOCK: Gefühl und Realität. Fichtes Auseinandersetzung mit Jacobi in der Grundlage der Wissenschaft des Praktischen. TEIL IV Marek SIEMEK: Wissen und Tun. Zur Handlungsweise der transzendentalen Subjektivität in der ersten Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes. Daniel BREAZEALE: Der fragwürdige »Primat der praktischen Vernunft« in Fichtes Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Marcin POREBA: Das Problem der transzendentalen Freiheit in semantischer Formulierung. Giuseppe DUSO: Absolutheit und Widerspruch in der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Manuel JIMÉNEZ-REDONDO: Der Begriff des Grundes in Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre. TEIL V Helmut GIRNDT: Das »Ich« des ersten Grundsatzes der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre in der Sicht der Wissenschaftslehre von 18042. Josef BEELER-PORT: Zum Stellenwert der Grundlage aus der Sicht von 1804. Eine Interpretation des Wechsels von analytisch-synthetischer und genetischer Methode in 5 der Grundlage. (shrink)

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational (...) agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner. (shrink)

Written by philosopher Jere Surber, Culture and Critique familiarizes students with both the broad and specialized meanings of cultural studies, providing detailed explanations of theoretical terms, critical strategies, and discursive traditions upon which it is based. In its broad and more theoretical sense, cultural studies indicates a range of modern discourses which, beyond disciplines and their particular theories, employ the notion of culture in a distinctive way and specify certain critical practices as appropriate for analyzing given cultural activities, products, (...) and institutions. In its narrower sense, cultural studies is a recently developed type of discourse, first appearing in several British universities in the 1950s, which, while eclectically drawing on certain theoretical aspects of earlier forms of critical cultural discourse, orients itself toward the analysis and practical critique of concrete contemporary cultural distinctions based on economic and political inequities.A useful reference for reading works in cultural studies, Culture and Critique puts unfamiliar terms and ideas into historical perspective and explains how the founding texts of the discipline first appeared. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become widely accepted that linguistic questions were much more central to the philosophical tradition of German idealism than had been previously thought. However, most of the key texts for this discussion remain largely unknown. The present work makes available, for the first time in English, what is the seminal work for this issue: Johann Gottlieb Fichte's monograph of 1795 entitled On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language, together with other closely related essays. The (...) translations are accompanied by a detailed interpretive essay that seeks to place these materials in their historical context, relate them to the systematic concerns of German idealism, and evaluate them in relation to later approaches to language, especially those of semiotics and poststructuralism. It also explores the role played by the linguistic thought of the German idealists in the emergance of modern "scientific linguistics" with wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as its connections with the origins of German romanticism. While the book draws upon state-of-the-art scholarship in these areas, it is written in such a way as to be accessible to any serious student of philosophy, intellectual and literary history, and linguistics. (shrink)

This article argues that military conditioning (MC) systematically violates the human dignity of soldiers. The argument relies on an absolute deontologist account of human dignity understood as a claim-right to live in self-respect, which is a right to decide on one’s own behalf about, and to be in control of, essential aspects of one’s own life. The article claims that MC violates soldiers’ dignity so understood because the largely automatic physical killing reflex that MC instills aims to remove their freedom (...) of choice to kill or not to kill, while the MC practices that rationalize the killing of opponents aim to subvert soldiers’ moral deliberation in relation to this behavior. MC thus aims to take away soldiers’ control over a very essential aspect of human life: the decision whether to take life in war. Thereby, MC systematically violates their human dignity. The article concludes with a proposal for an amendment to international law that would allow legal institutions to do more justice to soldiers’ dignity. (shrink)

The essay reviews the digital emergency measures many governments have adopted in an attempt to curb Covid-19. It argues that those ‘virologically legitimized’ measures may infringe the human right to privacy and mark the transition into a world of global surveillance. At this possible turning point in human history, panic and latent fear seem to fog much needed farsightedness. Leaving the current state of emotional paralysis and restarting to critically assess the digital pandemic management can serve as an emergency break (...) against drifting into a new era of digital monitoring. (shrink)

This article argues that the reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense by ‘reductive-individualist’ revisionist just war theories is inconsistent, because when those theories apply the moral notion of self-defense to the morality of killing in war, they do not preserve the two conceptions of the “individual” inherent in this notion. The article demonstrates this inconsistency in two steps: First, it disentangles the two conceptions of the individual inherent to the notion of (...) self-defense, namely (1) that the individual is an “entity” potentially bearing a right to self-defense (unlike, e.g., groups) and (2) that the individual is a “particular,” where “particular” signifies that every human is different from every other human. The conception of the individual as a “particular” is tied to the idea that a justification grounded in a rule of self-defense is necessarily “concrete,” in the sense of referring to individually given and specific perceptions or cases, as opposed to “abstract,” in the sense of being detached from specific perceptions or cases. The article then demonstrates that reductive individualism reflects the first notion of the individual, but not the second. Due to the “loss” of the individual as a “particular”, the reductive-individualist reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense is inconsistent, and hence its justification of killing in war grounded in self-defense is not concrete. Since such a justification must be concrete, reductive individualism cannot offer a justification for belligerent killing. (shrink)

The first anthology exclusively devoted to Hegel’s linguistic thought.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are one of the first examples of nanotechnology, with a history of promising uses and high expectations. This paper uses the recent debate over their future to explore both ethical and value-laden statements which unsettle the notion of CNTs as a value-free nanotechnology and their regulation as purely a technical affair. A point of departure is made with the inclusion of CNTs on the Substitute-It-Now list by the Swedish NGO ChemSec, an assessment process that anticipates and complements (...) the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation in Europe. An argument map is constructed to illustrate the core contention in the debate—should CNTs be substituted or not—which follows from a systematic literature review and content analysis of sampled journal articles. Nine arguments are articulated that bolster one of two camps: the pro-substitution camp or the contra-substitution camp. Beneath these arguments are a set of three implicit values that animate these two camps in prescribing competing interventions to resolve the dispute: (i) environmental protection and human safety, (ii) good science, and (iii) technological progress. This leads to a discussion around the regulatory problem of safeguarding conflicting values in decision-making under sustained scientific uncertainty. Finally, the study suggests further empirical work on specific nanomaterials in a pivot away from the abstract, promissory nature of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies in science, technology, and innovation policy. The examination of ethics and values is useful for mapping controversies in science and technology studies of regulation, even amongst experts in cognate research fields like nanomedicine and nanotoxicology. (shrink)

Contrary to many of the standard histories of German Idealism, the most recent research suggests that it did not grow smoothly and seamlessly from Kant's critical philosophy into Hegel's mature system, nor did it proceed without serious challenges launched from a wide variety of alternative philosophical perspectives. Probably the most sustained and trenchant assault upon this tradition came from a group of already well-established philosophers and intellectuals who referred to their project as "metacritique," a critical movement spearheaded by such luminaries (...) as J. G. Hamann, S. Maimon, F. H. Jacobi, and J. G. Herder. Employing approaches and arguments clearly prefiguring much later critiques, like those of ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism, and even cognitive psychology, the metacritics attempted to refute the transcendental pretensions of the German idealists through a rigorous linguistic critique of idealist philosophical discourse. This linguistic challenge and its response from the idealist party also drew into its ambit such important figures of the early Romantic movement as August and Friedrich Schlegel and August Ferdinand Bernhardi. Although this extended discussion between the early idealists and their linguistic metacritics formed an important episode of European intellectual history, neither the crucial texts nor an interpretive discussion of them have to date been available to the English-speaking student. The present work fills this important gap in our understanding of the period by offering an extensive interpretive and critical overview of the metacritical challenge and the responses to it, together with English translations of the key texts, each with its own introduction and commentary. This outstanding collection will be useful for any class on German idealism and for providing an accurate historical context for some of the later philosophical charges leveled against this tradition. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hegel's Linguistic Inheritance Hegel's Early View of Language in the Jena Period (1804–1806) Language in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Language in Hegel's ‘Mature System’ ( The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences ) (1818–1830) The Philosophy of Language: The Unwritten Volume.

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness. In developing my argument, I draw on integrated information theory, a much-discussed theory of consciousness. I conclude by pointing out an implication (...) of my argument for the normative status of group agents. (shrink)

This collection, essentially a Festschrift presented to Paul Weiss on his eighty-fifth birthday, consists of fourteen contributions, primarily by his former students and colleagues past and present, together with an introduction by the editor that provides a helpful historical survey of Weiss's philosophical development. About half of the material seems to have been written specifically for this volume, the rest having either appeared elsewhere or having been presented at a symposium on the philosophy of Paul Weiss held in 1981. The (...) contributions are organized into five sections: Weissian method, the relation between Weiss's work and the sciences, issues concerning the relation between metaphysics and ethics, four essays exploring Weiss's contributions to such areas as sports and architecture, and three final pieces intended perhaps to convey something of a sense of "Weiss in process." The editor also provides a chronological bibliography of Weiss's publications. (shrink)

The Editor begins his Introduction to this volume by suggesting that any scholarly study of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature that hopes to be taken seriously must confront some formidable obstacles. Expanding his discussion just a bit, I would say that there are at least three. First, thanks to a long tradition of vocal, though often uninformed, anti-Hegelian diatribe, especially in the English-speaking world, on the part of thinkers as diverse as Russell, Popper, and Whitehead, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature has been (...) summarily dismissed on the simple grounds that he was not only ignorant of even the most basic findings and procedures of the empirical sciences of his day, but claimed to have logically “deduced” certain empirical facts and laws that were demonstrably false. Second, with the notable exception of Whitehead, most twentieth century thinkers, even if not explicitly anti-Hegelian, have tended to regard the traditional philosophical “discipline” of a Philosophy of Nature as a quaint relic of a metaphysically befuddled and happily bygone era, displaced without remainder by the logical and methodological investigations that make up the modern Philosophy of Science. Third, the dominant tradition of sympathetic scholarship on Hegel has played into the hands of the opposing party by all too often offering them a version of Hegel and his immediate predecessors as metaphysical Idealists who must, on principle, rule out of court anything which the empirical sciences might have to contribute to their philosophical projects. All the essays in this collection attempt to challenge one or more of these prejudices, thus collectively making the counter-case that Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature still has much to teach us if read in a sufficiently informed yet open-minded manner. The case is a persuasive one as it stands, although I will later suggest some additional considerations that are largely lacking in this volume. (shrink)

Given the current interest in Hegel in the English-speaking world and the prevailing philosophical concern with language which forms a large part of its intellectual background, a work dealing with the topic of language in Hegel’s thought seems especially useful and appropriate. Just as the recent turn to Hegel on the part of some philosophers might be partially explained by an impatience with the self-imposed limits of “ordinary language philosophy” on the one hand, and an awareness of the problems which (...) have led to the disintegration of the “phenomenological movement” on the other, one might expect that Hegel’s reflections upon language would provide many with a fruitful basis for a renewed approach to those problems with which both of these traditions have been preoccupied. Professor Cook’s book is a solid step in this direction. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...) what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

Political theorists have offered many accounts of collective decision-making under pluralism. I discuss a key dimension on which such accounts differ: the importance assigned not only to the choices made but also to the reasons underlying those choices. On that dimension, different accounts lie in between two extremes. The ‘minimal liberal account’ holds that collective decisions should be made only on practical actions or policies and that underlying reasons should be kept private. The ‘comprehensive deliberative account’ stresses the importance of (...) giving reasons for collective decisions, where such reasons should also be collectively decided. I compare these two accounts on the basis of a formal model developed in the growing literature on the ‘discursive dilemma’ and ‘judgment aggregation’ and address several questions: What is the trade-off between the (minimal liberal) demand for reaching agreement on outcomes and the (comprehensive deliberative) demand for reason-giving? How large should the ‘sphere of public reason’ be? When do the decision procedures suggested by the two accounts agree and when not? How good are these procedures at truthtracking on factual matters? What strategic incentives do they generate for decision-makers? My discussion identifies what is at stake in the choice between minimal liberal and comprehensive deliberative accounts of collective decisionmaking, and sheds light not only on these two ideal-typical accounts themselves, but also on many characteristics that intermediate accounts share with them. (shrink)

How to integrate artificial intelligence technologies in the functioning and structures of our society has become a concern of contemporary politics and public debates. In this paper, we investigate national AI strategies as a peculiar form of co-shaping this development, a hybrid of policy and discourse that offers imaginaries, allocates resources, and sets rules. Conceptually, the paper is informed by sociotechnical imaginaries, the sociology of expectations, myths, and the sublime. Empirically we analyze AI policy documents of four key players in (...) the field, namely China, the United States, France, and Germany. The results show that the narrative construction of AI strategies is strikingly similar: they all establish AI as an inevitable and massively disrupting technological development by building on rhetorical devices such as a grand legacy and international competition. Having established this inevitable, yet uncertain, AI future, national leaders proclaim leadership intervention and articulate opportunities and distinct national pathways. While this narrative construction is quite uniform, the respective AI imaginaries are remarkably different, reflecting the vast cultural, political, and economic differences of the countries under study. As governments endow these imaginary pathways with massive resources and investments, they contribute to coproducing the installment of these futures and, thus, yield a performative lock-in function. (shrink)

As government pressure on major technology companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for technical solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. Automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools – what we define here as algorithmic moderation systems – are increasingly being deployed to conduct content moderation at scale by major platforms for user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This article provides an accessible technical primer on how algorithmic moderation works; examines some (...) of the existing automated tools used by major platforms to handle copyright infringement, terrorism and toxic speech; and identifies key political and ethical issues for these systems as the reliance on them grows. Recent events suggest that algorithmic moderation has become necessary to manage growing public expectations for increased platform responsibility, safety and security on the global stage; however, as we demonstrate, these systems remain opaque, unaccountable and poorly understood. Despite the potential promise of algorithms or ‘AI’, we show that even ‘well optimized’ moderation systems could exacerbate, rather than relieve, many existing problems with content policy as enacted by platforms for three main reasons: automated moderation threatens to further increase opacity, making a famously non-transparent set of practices even more difficult to understand or audit, further complicate outstanding issues of fairness and justice in large-scale sociotechnical systems and re-obscure the fundamentally political nature of speech decisions being executed at scale. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

Is equality a distributive value or does it rather point to the quality of social relationships? This article criticizes the distributive character of luck egalitarian theories of justice and fleshes out the central characteristics of an alternative, relational approach to equality. It examines a central objection to distributive theories: that such theories cannot account for the significance of how institutions treat people (as opposed to the outcomes they bring about). I discuss two variants of this objection: first, that distributive theories (...) fail to account for the importance of how institutions cause good shortfalls and, second, that they fail to account for the normative attitude of social and political institutions expressed in different ways of treating people. The article argues that the causal variant of the objection has only very limited reach, and endorses the expressive variant: the attitudes expressed by institutions in their treatment of persons, such as contempt or neglect, generate potentially unjust social relationships and hierarchies. This should be the focus of a relational egalitarian approach to social justice. The article proceeds to explain how it is possible that artificial agents such as institutions have attitudes and how these attitudes are not reducible to those of the individuals that sustain them, and argues that distributive theories cannot be so modified as to account for such attitudes. It concludes by indicating several directions for the development of more worked-out conceptions of relational equality on this basis. (shrink)

This paper offers a comparison of three different kinds of collective attitudes: aggregate, common, and corporate attitudes. They differ not only in their relationship to individual attitudes—e.g., whether they are “reducible” to individual attitudes—but also in the roles they play in relation to the collectives to which they are ascribed. The failure to distinguish them can lead to confusion, in informal talk as well as in the social sciences. So, the paper’s message is an appeal for disambiguation.

In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying institutional design in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e. its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group (...) can meet two challenges: the ‘rationality challenge’ and the ‘knowledge challenge’. The rationality challenge arises when a group is required to endorse consistent beliefs or judgments; the knowledge challenge arises when the group’s beliefs or judgments are required to track certain truths. My discussion seeks to identify those properties of an aggregation procedure that affect a group’s success at meeting each of the two challenges. (shrink)

We offer a critical assessment of the “exclusion argument” against free will, which may be summarized by the slogan: “My brain made me do it, therefore I couldn't have been free”. While the exclusion argument has received much attention in debates about mental causation (“could my mental states ever cause my actions?”), it is seldom discussed in relation to free will. However, the argument informally underlies many neuroscientific discussions of free will, especially the claim that advances in neuroscience seriously challenge (...) our belief in free will. We introduce two distinct versions of the argument, discuss several unsuccessful responses to it, and then present our preferred response. This involves showing that a key premise – the “exclusion principle” – is false under what we take to be the most natural account of causation in the context of agency: the difference-making account. We finally revisit the debate about neuroscience and free will. (shrink)

Our aim in this survey article is to provide an accessible overview of some key results and questions in the theory of judgment aggregation. We omit proofs and technical details, focusing instead on concepts and underlying ideas.

The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote (...) these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss a seemingly straightforward argument against physicalism which, despite being implicit in much of the philosophical debate about consciousness, has not received the attention it deserves (compared to other, better-known “epistemic”, “modal”, and “conceivability” arguments). This is the argument from the non-supervenience of the first-personal (and indexical) facts on the third-personal (and non-indexical) ones. This non-supervenience, together with the assumption that the physical facts (as conventionally understood) are third-personal, entails that some facts – (...) namely, first-personal, phenomenal ones – do not supervene on the physical facts. Unlike other arguments against physicalism, the first-personal argument, if successful, refutes not only physicalism but also other third-personal metaphysical pictures, including standard versions of dualism. (shrink)

Social choice theory is the study of collective decision processes and procedures. It is not a single theory, but a cluster of models and results concerning the aggregation of individual inputs (e.g., votes, preferences, judgments, welfare) into collective outputs (e.g., collective decisions, preferences, judgments, welfare). Central questions are: How can a group of individuals choose a winning outcome (e.g., policy, electoral candidate) from a given set of options? What are the properties of different voting systems? When is a voting system (...) democratic? How can a collective (e.g., electorate, legislature, collegial court, expert panel, or committee) arrive at coherent collective preferences or judgments on some issues, on the basis of its members' individual preferences or judgments? How can we rank different social alternatives in an order of social welfare? Social choice theorists study these questions not just by looking at examples, but by developing general models and proving theorems. (shrink)

At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination, as opposed to freedom as noninterference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a particular rule-of-law requirement, whereas liberal freedom does not. Liberals may also endorse such a requirement, but not as part of their conception of freedom itself. I offer a formal analysis of this rule-of-law requirement and compare liberal and (...) republican freedom on its basis. While I agree with Pettit that republican freedom has broader implications than liberal freedom, I conclude that we face a trade-off between two dimensions of freedom (scope and robustness) and that it is harder for republicans to solve that trade-off than it is for liberals. Key Words: freedom • republicanism • liberalism • noninterference • non-domination • rule of law • robustness • liberal paradox. (shrink)