Philip Pettit

Comment chercher à situer, dans l'expérience humaine, les termes ou les concepts moraux ? Autrement dit, où, dans l'expérience, la morale devient-elle saillante pour nous ? C'est par le biais d'une généalogie naturaliste qu'il nous faut envisager la problématique, dans la mesure où nous ne possédons pas un sens moral irréductible par lequel des propriétés morales irréductibles nous seraient connues. Je soutiens que si des sujets intentionnels n'ont nul besoin de disposer de concepts normatifs, il en sera autrement pour des créatures discursives. Ces dernières, afin de raisonner ensemble, devront avoir accès aux concepts normatifs inférentiels et c'est par deux voies distinctes qu'elles seront amenées à prendre note des considérations morales. La première engage les individus qui privilégient le discours, comme forme d'interaction ; la seconde, ceux qui étendent cette pratique discursive au domaine du sentiment. Le privilège accordé au discours et l'exercice discursif du sentiment constituent les deux sources distinctes d'une conceptualisation morale, évoquées dans le titre de cet article. Dans une brève conclusion, il est suggéré que les différents concepts qu'elles fournissent représentent des candidats attractifs rivaux pour la construction de la théorie morale.Where in human experience are moral terms or concepts grounded; where in experience does the moral becomes salient to us? The question calls for a naturalistic genealogy, so far as we are not possessed of an irreducibly moral sense whereby irreducibly moral properties might be revealed to us. I argue that intentional subjects need not have any normative concepts whatsoever but that creatures who are discursive do. They will have to access inferentially normative concepts so far as they reason together and there are two separate ways in which they will be disposed to register moral considerations. The first involves them privileging discourse as a form of interaction and the second involves them extending such discourse to the realm of sentiment. Privileging discourse and discursifying sentiment are the two distinct sources of moral conceptualisation that are signaled in the title of the paper, and a brief conclusion suggests that the different concepts they provide represent rival attractors in the construction of moral theory

The concept of freedom as non-domination that is associated with neo-republican theory provides a guiding ideal in the global, not just the domestic arena, and does so even on the assumption that there will continue to be many distinct states. It argues for a world in which states do not dominate members of their own people and, considered as a corporate body, no people is dominated by other agencies: not by other states and not, for example, by any international agency or multi-national corporation. This ideal is not only attractive in the abstract, it also supports a concrete range of sensible, if often radical international policies.

In this paper I focus on how far the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination can and should command allegiance across different cultures. Is the ideal bound to western culture, as its provenance may suggest? Or does it have a hold on the human imagination and sensibility that survives across various cultural and historical divides? I argue, in a deeply unfashionable vein,that it does command a form of universal allegiance. Or, to be more exact, I argue that freedom as non-domination has this status in its role as an ideal of social justice. Reasons of space make it impossible to extend the argument to its role as an ideal of political and international justice —as an ideal of democracy and sovereignty —but the considerations I muster should make clear how that argument would go

One of the most important challenges for political theory is to identify the extent to which corporations should be facilitated and restricted in law. By way of background to that challenge, we need to develop a view about the nature and potential of corporations and corporate bodies in general. This chapter discusses two fallacies that we should avoid in this exercise. One, a claim popular among economists, that corporate bodies are not really agents at all. The other, a claim associated with US jurisprudence, that not only are they agents, they are persons whose rights call in the same way as the rights of individual persons for legal recognition and protection.

There are two rival images often offered of the state. In one the state serves like a nanny to provide for the welfare of its members; in the other it requires people to look after themselves, providing only the service of a night-watchman. But this dichotomy, which is routinely invoked in debates about public health and welfare provision in general, is misleading. What the rival images turn on is not competing pictures of how the state should function in people's lives but competing pictures of what it is to guard the freedom of its people. On the neo-liberal theory, which has been dominant over the last century or so, providing for people's freedom means leaving them to their own devices and fortunes. On the neo-republican theory, which answers to a much longer tradition, it means democratically identifying a common set of basic liberties in the exercise of which everyone should be protected by law and, if necessary, resourced. This older way of thinking about freedom has important merits missing in the newer and argues strongly against the nightwatchman state.

Let justice be a feature of the social order imposed by a state and legitimacy a feature of how it is imposed: one that makes the imposition acceptable. This article argues that, so understood, legitimacy is quite a distinct concern from justice; that the core concern is with showing how state coercion is consistent with people’s being free citizens; that this does not require showing that the state exists by consensus or contract; that the best hope of satisfying the concern lies with arguing that state coercion need not be dominating; and that this is possible only within the republican theory that identifies freedom with the absence of domination, not interference.