Philip Pettit

Invoking its social function can explain why we find a certain functional trait or institution only if we can identify a mechanism whereby the playing of the function connects with the explanandum. That is the main claim in the missing-mechanism critique of functionalism. Is it correct? Yes, if functional explanation is meant to make sense of the actual presence of the trait or institution. No, if it is meant to make sense of why the trait or institution is resilient: why we can rely on it to survive various contingencies. The lesson? Social functionalism should be taken, and may have been taken by its founders, as a programme for explaining resilience.

Trusting someone in an intuitive, rich sense of the term involves not just relying on that person, but manifesting reliance on them in the expectation that this manifestation of reliance will increase their reason and motive to prove reliable. Can trust between people be formed on the basis of Internet contact alone? Forming the required expectation in regard to another person, and so trusting them on some matter, may be due to believing that they are trustworthy; to believing that they seek es teem and will be rationally responsive to the good opinion communicated or promised by an act of trust; or to both factors at once. Neither mechanism can rationally command confidence, however, in the case where people are related only via the Internet. On the Internet everyone wears the ring of Gyges; everyone is invisible, in their personal identity, to others.

The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper argues, in the course of exploring the desiderata, that a neo-republican philosophy of government does pretty well in satisfying them.

This reply argues five points, in response to the commentaries on my book, “Made with Words”. First, that Hobbes's theory of language may have supported his materialism, as his materialism supported the theory of language. Second, that for Hobbes legal penalties as such do not take from freedom, only legal obligations. Third, that his emphasis on maker's knowledge explains his theory of a priori demonstrable knowledge and, in particular, the importance he gives to definitions. Fourth, that Hobbes's theory of the desire for power suggests, against his own strategy, that people each ought to seek the equality that goes with others not having power over them; this is the next best to the inequality a person would enjoy in having power over others. And fifth, that Hobbes's theory of freedom is inferior in a number of respects to the republican theory of freedom as non-domination that he opposed

There are three major issues which crop up in the discussion of metaphor among philosophers of language. They are: whether metaphor is cognitive, whether it is descriptive, and whether it is innovative. Those who deny that metaphor is cognitive are a group more often imagined than encountered, but if they existed they would consign the study of metaphor to affective stylistics, stressing the ornamentative and related effects which the phenomenon is likely to have.‘ Those who admit that metaphor is cognitive and go on to reject the idea that it is descriptive also assign the study of metaphor to stylistics, but stylistics with a cognitive emphasis. What is primarily to be studied in their view is not any descriptive content but the effects which metaphor has in drawing certain things to the attention of an audience and in changing thereby the audience’s general point of view.

Suppose we embrace the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination: freedom as immunity to arbitrary interference. In that case those acts that call uncontroversially for criminalization will usually be objectionable on three grounds: the offender assumes a dominating position in relation to the victim, the offender reduces the range or ease of undominated choice on the part of the victim, and the offender raises a spectre of domination for others like the victim. And in that case, so it appears, the obvious role for punishment will be, so far as possible, to undo such evils: to rectify the effects of the crime that make it a repugnant republican act. This paper explores this theory of punishment as rectification, contrasting it with better established utilitarian and retributivist approaches

The background thesis is that an implicit ontology of the people and the relation between the people and the state often shapes how we think in normative terms about politics. This article attempts to defend that thesis in relation to Rawls. The argument is that the rejection of an image of the people as a group agent connects with his objection to utilitarianism and the rejection of an image of the people as a mere aggregate connects with his objection to libertarianism. Rawls, it is argued, holds by an in-between picture and it is this that explains many of his most distinctive commitments. Key Words: Rawls • social ontology • group agent • solidarism • singularism • civicity.

Si les non-conséquentialistes veulent adhérer à l'exigence d'universalisabilité, alors ils devront adopter une prise de position étonnamment relativiste. Non seulement vont-ils affirmer, dans une veine familière, que les prémisses invoquées dans l'argumentation morale n'ont de force que relative à l'agent, c'est-à-dire qu'elles peuvent impliquer l'usage d'un indexical — comme dans la considération que cette option-ci ou celle-là favoriserait mes engagements, me délesterait de mes devoirs ou bénéficierait à mes enfants — et qu'elles ne peuvent fournir de raisons qu'à l'agent indexicalement pertinent, moi-même en l'occurrence. Ils devront aussi interpréter la considération invoquée dans les conclusions morales typiques, selon laquelle telle ou telle option est juste ou devrait être choisie ou peu importe, comme n'ayant elle-même qu'une force relative à l'agent.If non-consequentialists are to embrace the requirement of universalisability, then they will have to strike a surprisingly relativistic stance. Not only will they say, in familiar vein, that the premises adduced in moral argument may only be agent-relative in force: that is, may involve the use of an indexical — as in the consideration that this or that option would advance my commitments, discharge my duty, or benefit my children — and may provide reasons only for the indexically relevant agent: in this case, me. They will also have to construe the consideration adduced in typical moral conclusions, to the effect that this or that option is right or ought to be chosen or whatever, as itself only agent-relative in force