•  165
    The consequentialist can recognise rights
    Philosophical Quarterly 38 (150): 42-55. 1988.
    consequentialist, even being a utilitarian, allows one still to recognise rights.' I believe that these efforts are well motivated, for I think that any moral doctrine is suspect if one of its effects is to make agents unable to take one another's rights seriously
  •  165
    The backward induction paradox
    Journal of Philosophy 86 (4): 169-182. 1989.
  •  160
    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 …Read more
  •  156
    The recent debates about the nature of social freedom, understood in a broadly negative way, have generated three main views of the topic: these represent freedom respectively as non-limitation, non-interference and non-domination. The participants in these debates often go different ways, however, because they address different topics under common names, not because they hold different intuitions on common topics. Social freedom is sometimes understood as option-freedom, sometimes as agency-fre…Read more
  •  153
    Republicanism Across Cultures
    In Jun-Hyeok Kwak & Leigh Jenco (eds.), Republicanism in Northeast Asia, Routledge. 2013.
    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. O…Read more
  •  152
    In a recent discussion of Amartya Sen's concept of the capabilities of people for functioning in their society – and the idea of targeting people's functioning capabilities in evaluating the society – G. A. Cohen accuses Sen of espousing an inappropriate, ‘athletic’ image of the person (Cohen, 1993, pp. 24–5). The idea is that if Sen's formulations are to be taken at face value, then life is valuable only so far as people actively choose most facets of their existence: if they fare well in the m…Read more
  •  148
    The Asymmetry of Good and Evil
    In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 5, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 15-37. 2015.
  •  147
    Consequentialism and moral psychology
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1). 1994.
    Consequentialism ought not to make an impact, explicit or implicit, on every decision. All it ought generally to enjoy is what I describe as a virtual presence in the deliberation that produces decisions. [...] The argument that we have conducted suggests that the virtuous agent ought in general to remain faithful to his or her instincts and ingrained habits, only occasionally breaking with them in the name of promoting the best consequences.
  •  146
    What makes human beings intentional and thinking subjects? How does their intentionality and thought connect with their social nature and their communal experience? How do the answers to these questions shape the assumptions which it is legitimate to make in social explanation and political evaluation? These are the broad-ranging issues which Pettit addresses in this novel study. The Common Mind argues for an original way of marking off thinking subjects, in particular human beings, from other i…Read more
  •  145
    Modal functionalism is the view that talk about possible worlds should be construed as talk about fictional objects. The version of modal fictionalism originally presented by Gideon Rosen adopted a simple prefixing strategy for fictionalising possible worlds analyses of modal propositions. However, Stuart Brock and Rosen himself in a later article have independently advanced an objection that shows that the prefixing strategy cannot serve fictionalist purposes. In this paper we defend fictionali…Read more
  •  142
    Looks as powers
    Philosophical Issues 13 (1): 221-52. 2003.
    Although they may differ on the reason why, many philosophers hold that it is a priori that an object is red if and only if it is such as to look red to normal observers in normal conditions.
  •  140
    Locke, expressivism, conditionals
    with F. Jackson
    Analysis 63 (1): 86-92. 2003.
    The sentence ‘x is square’ might have had different truth conditions from those it in fact has. It might have had no truth conditions at all. Its having truth conditions and its having the ones it has rest on empirical facts about our use of ‘x is square’. What empirical facts? Any answer that goes into detail is inevitably highly controversial, but we think that there is a rough answer that is, by philosophers’ standards, relatively uncontroversial. It goes back to Locke 1689 and beyond, and is…Read more
  •  138
    Non-consequentialism and universalizability
    Philosophical Quarterly 50 (199): 175-190. 2000.
    If non-consequentialists are to embrace the requirement of universalizability, then they will have to adopt a surprisingly relativistic stance. Not only will they say, in familiar vein, that the premises adduced in moral argument may be only 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,…Read more
  •  133
    Subject, Thought, And Context (edited book)
    Clarendon Press. 1986.
    Are mental states "in the head"? Or do they intrinsically involve aspects of the subject's physical and social context? This volume presents a number of essays dealing with the compass of the mind. The contributors broach a range of issues with a commmon view that physical and social magnets do act upon mental states. The approaches that run through these papers make the volume challenging to cognitive psychologists, theorists of artificial intelligence, social theorists, and philosophers.
  •  132
    This innovative approach to freedom starts from an account of what we mean by describing someone, in a psychological vein, as a free subject. Pettit develops an argument as to what it is that makes someone free in that basic sense; and then goes on to derive the implications of the approach for issues of freedom in political theory. Freedom in the subject is equated with the person's being fit to be held responsible and to be authorized as a partner in interaction. This book is unique among cont…Read more
  •  132
    A definition of physicalism
    Analysis 53 (4): 213-23. 1993.
    Defines physicalism in terms of claims that microphysical entities constitute everything and that microphysical laws govern everything. With a reply by Crane
  •  131
    Winch’s double-edged idea of a social science
    History of the Human Sciences 13 (1): 63-77. 2000.
    Peter Winch’s 1958 book The Idea of a Social Science contains two distinguishable sets of theses, one set bearing on the individual-level understanding of human beings, the other on the society-level understanding of the regularities and institutions to which human beings give rise. The first set of claims is persuasive and significant but the second is a mixed bunch: none is well established and only some are sound
  •  130
    Hands invisible and intangible
    with Geoffrey Brennan
    Synthese 94 (2). 1993.
    The notion of a spontaneous social order, an order in human affairs which operates without the intervention of any directly ordering mind, has a natural fascination for social and political theorists. This paper provides a taxonomy under which there are two broadly contrasting sorts of spontaneous social order. One is the familiar invisible hand; the other is an arrangement that we describe as the intangible hand. The paper is designed to serve two main purposes. First, to provide a pure account…Read more
  •  129
    The hidden economy of esteem
    with Geoffrey Brennan
    Economics and Philosophy 16 (1): 77-98. 2000.
    A generation of social theorists have argued that if free-rider considerations show that certain collective action predicaments are unresolvable under individual, rational choice – unresolvable under an arrangement where each is free to pursue their own relative advantage – then those considerations will equally show that the predicaments cannot be resolved by recourse to norms (Buchanan, 1975, p. 132; Heath, 1976, p. 30; Sober and Wilson, 1998, 156ff; Taylor, 1987, p. 144). If free-rider consid…Read more
  •  128
    Substantive moral theory
    Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1): 1-27. 2008.
    Philosophy can serve two roles in relation to moral thinking: first, to provide a meta-ethical commentary on the nature of moral thought, as the methodology or the philosophy of science provides a commentary on the nature of scientific thought; and second, to build on the common presumptions deployed in people's moral thinking about moral issues, looking for a substantive moral theory that they might support. The present essay addresses the nature of this second role; illustrates it with substan…Read more
  •  126
    Three conceptions of democratic control
    Constellations 15 (1): 46-55. 2008.
    The idea of control or power is central to the notion of democracy, since the ideal is one of giving kratos to the demos: giving maximal or at least significant control over government to the people. But it turns out that the notion of kratos or control is definable in various ways and that as the notion is differently understood, so the ideal of democracy is differently interpreted. In this little reflection, I distinguish between three different notions of popular control, arguing that only on…Read more
  •  125
    Two Construals of Scanlon’s Contractualism
    with T. M. Scanlon
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (3): 148-164. 2000.
  •  123
    An esteemed philosopher discusses his theory of universal freedom, describing how even those who are members of free societies may find their liberties curtailed and includes tests of freedom including the eyeball test and the tough-luck test.
  •  120
    Terms, things and response-dependence
    European Review of Philosophy 3 55-66. 1998.
  •  120