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2662Republican Freedom and Contestatory DemocratizationIn Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies Ian Shapiro, Ian Shapiro, Casiano Hacker-Cordón & Russell Hardin (eds.), Democracy's Value, Cambridge University Press. pp. 163-190. 1999.
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599Republican Political TheoryIn Andrew Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 112-131. 1997.
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431Group agency: the possibility, design, and status of corporate agentsOxford University Press. 2011.Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sci…Read more
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227Unveiling the VoteBritish Journal of Political Science 20 (3): 311-333. 1990.The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensib…Read more
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59Preference, Deliberation and SatisfactionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 59 131-154. 2006.In his famous lecture on ‘The Concept of Preference’ Amartya Sen (1982) opened up the topic of preference and preference-satisfaction to critical, philosophical debate. He pointed out that preference in the sense in which choice reveals one’s preference need not be preference in the sense in which people are personally better off for having their preferences satisfied. And on the basis of that observation he built a powerful critique of some common assumptions in welfare economics.
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4FrontmatterIn Philip Pettit & Christopher Hookway (eds.), Handlung Und Interpretation: Studien Zur Philosophie der Sozialwissenschaften, De Gruyter. 1982.
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182Rawls: ‘A Theory of Justice' and its CriticsStanford University Press. 1990.1 A New Departure 'No commanding work of political theory has appeared in the 20th century.' So said Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1962 . ...
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47The Inescapability of ConsequentialismIn Ulrike Heuer & Gerald Lang (eds.), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes From the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 41. 2012.
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170Keeping Republican Freedom SimplePolitical Theory 30 (3): 339-356. 2002.There has recently been a good deal of interest in the republican tradition, particularly in the political conception of freedom maintained within that tradition. I look here at the characterisation of republican liberty in a recent work of Quentin Skinner1and argue on historical and conceptual grounds for a small amendment—a simplification—that would make it equivalent to the view that freedom in political contexts should be identified with nondomination.
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52Discourse theory and republican freedomCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6 (1): 72-95. 2003.This essay outlines some of the main issues that arise in the theory of freedom and, in particular, those that divide the liberal conception of freedom as non-interference from the republican conception of freedom as non-domination. It goes on to explore the idea that discourse theory provides reasons for favouring the republican conception. Discourse theory is taken for these purposes to be a theory that subsumes, but goes beyond decision theory. It accepts the decision-theoretic view that huma…Read more
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108Review: On thinking how to live: A cognitivist view (review)Mind 115 (460): 1083-1106. 2006.Allan Gibbard’s strategy in his new book is to begin by describing a psychology of thinking and planning that certain agents might instantiate, then to argue that this psychology involves an ‘expressivism’ about thought that bears on what to do, and, finally, to try to show that ascribing that same psychology to human beings would explain the way we deploy various concepts in practical and normative deliberation. The idea is to construct an imaginary normative psychology, purportedly conforming t…Read more
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1David Papineau, "For Science in the Social Sciences" (review)Theory and Decision 12 (2): 207. 1980.
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34My thanks to the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. I also had the benefit of an exchange with Christopher McMahon. 1. Christopher McMahon, “The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (2005): 67–93, at p. 89. All parenthetical references in the text are to this article.
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4In Elucidation of the Common Mind: A Reply To Raimo TuomelaInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (2): 322. 1994.
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184Restrictive consequentialismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (4). 1986.paper offers both explication and defence. Standard consequentialism is a theory of decision. It attempts to identify, for any set of alternative options, that which it is right that an agent should..
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1Neorepublicanism and Sen's economic, legal, and ethical desiderataIn Reiko Gotoh & Paul Dumouchel (eds.), Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
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56DesireRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1998.If an agent is to be moved to action, then two requirements have to be fulfilled: first, the agent must possess beliefs about the way things actually are, about the actions possible given the way things are, and about the likely effects of those actions on how things are; and, second, the agent must have or form desires to change the way things are by resorting to this or that course of action. The beliefs tell the agent about how things are and about how they can be altered; the desires attract…Read more
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141Hands invisible and intangibleSynthese 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
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31This book is in three sections, with two chapters in each. It begins with questions of psychology: questions to do with what it means to be an intentional agent and, in particular, what it means to be an agent with the capacity for thought. Having sketched an overall view of the intentional, thinking agent, it then goes on to explore the difference that social life makes to the mentality of such agents; in effect, it outlines a social ontology. And, having developed a picture of the mind in soci…Read more
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27Habermas on Truth and JusticeRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 14 207-228. 1982.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 soc…Read more
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1A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of AgencyPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (212): 473-476. 2003.
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16Wittgenstein and case for structuralismJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 3 (1): 46-57. 1972.
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38Physicalism without pop-outIn David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, Mit Press. 2009.Imagine a very fi ne grid or graph on which dots are placed at various coordinates so that, as a consequence, this or that shape materializes there. Depending on the coordinates of the dots, different shapes will appear, and for every shape there will be a pattern in the coordinates that guarantees its appearance. Take, for example, the diagonal line that slopes rightward and upward at an angle of 45 degrees from the origin. This line is bound to make an appearance so long as the coordinates sat…Read more
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