Philip Pettit

Artykuł jest poświęcony trzem poglądom na temat demokracji, często przyjmowanym przez współczesnych decydentów, politologów i teoretyków polityki. Poglądy te, w mojej opinii, są błędne, ale błędne w sposób pouczający. Ukazują one bowiem poważne niezrozumienie natury i walorów demokracji. Jeśli uświadomimy sobie, dlaczego są one błędne, dostrzeżemy istnienie tych wymiarów demokracji, które zwykle łatwo umykają naszej uwadze. Do nazwania tych błędów używam nazwisk wybitnych myślicieli, którzy je popełnili. Pierwszy z nich określam błędem Berlina, odnajduję go bowiem w dorobku brytyjskiego myśliciela rosyjskiego pochodzenia, Isaiaha Berlina. Drugi z nich określam błędem Schumpetera, nazywając go na cześć amerykańskiego bankowca, ekonomisty i myśliciela politycznego austriackiego pochodzenia, Josepha Schumpetera. Trzeci określam mianem błędu Rikera, przypisując go Williamowi Rikerowi, amerykańskiemu politologowi, znanemu ze swojego rozróżnienia między liberalizmem a populizmem.

For non-consequentialists an agent is justified in refusing to breach certain constraints even for the sake of apparently more important, neutral goals: even, indeed, for the sake of maximizing the overall satisfaction of those very constraints. To put the message in a slogan: ‘Not by my hands’. But how can non-consequentialism offer a distinctive evaluation of the social and political arrangements (say, the property conventions) that ethics presupposes? The only plausible answer is: by laying down constraints that we, the community, ought to satisfy in imposing such arrangements on individuals.‘Not by our hands’, as it might be put. But this response is not satisfactory. In this fundamental, political sphere of evaluation, consequentialism is inescapable.

Having a self means being able think of myself under a certain profile that that is me: that is who I am, that is how I am. But if I raise the question as to who or how I am, there are three salient profiles in which I can cast myself, three selves with which we can identify. I can see myself just as an agent identified over time by the linkages between my experiences, my attitudes and my actions. I can see myself as the persona that I invite others to rely on and that, if sincere, I internalize. And I can see myself as the figure I cut in other people's eyes, whether or not I welcome that image. Such ambiguities help explain the complexity in philosophical discussion of the self as well as the conflict in everyday exhortations to be ourselves and know ourselves, yet also to forget ourselves and lose ourselves.

This chapter sketches what is considered the best interpretation of physicalism, rehearses the best way of defending it, and shows that the physicalism forthcoming is still going to be less than fully satisfying; it is going to leave us short of the satisfaction that might be expected from a philosophical theory. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first section gives an interpretation of physicalism in the spirit of Frank Jackson's; this involves a rich version under which the way things are phenomenally is derivable in principle from physical premisses. The second sketches a representationalist or intentionalist argument for physicalism about phenomenal experience, one which also appeals to Jackson. The third section argues that even if we accept this case for a rich physicalism, still we should not expect to find the doctrine fully satisfying; the simulatory gap will stand between us and a sort of satisfaction that we might have expected to achieve.

David Lewis [1988; 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the 'Desire-as-Belief Thesis'. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis's. We explore ways of being anti-Humean that evade all these negative results. We begin by providing background on evidential decision theory and on Lewis's negative results. We then introduce what we call the indexicality loophole: if the goodness of a proposition is indexical, partly a function of an agent's mental state, then the negative results have no purchase. Thus we propose a variant of Desire-as-Belief that exploits this loophole. We argue that a number of meta-ethical positions are committed to just such indexicality. Indeed, we show that with one central sort of evaluative belief--the belief that an option is right--the indexicality loophole can be exploited in various interesting ways. Moreover, on some accounts, 'good' is indexical in the same way. Thus, it seems that the anti-Humean can dodge the negative results.

The problem which motivates this paper bears on the relationship between Marxism and morality. It is not the well-established question of whether the Marxist's commitments undermine an attachment to ethical standards, but the more neglected query as to whether they allow the espousal of political ideals. The study and assessment of political ideals is pursued nowadays under the title of theory of justice, the aim of such theory being to provide a criterion for distinguishing just patterns of social organization from unjust ones. The main rivals in the field represent justice respectively as legitimacy, welfare and fairness. Marxism does not put forward a distinctive conception of justice itself and the question is whether the Marxist is free to choose as he thinks fit among the candidates on offer.