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618Democratic theoryIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 208--30. 2005.
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2The Theoretical Interpretation of VotingDissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison. 1986.The present thesis is intended as a contribution toward a Rousseauean theory of democracy. The central problem discussed is how the act of voting must be interpreted in democratic theory. The notion of a theoretical interpretation of voting is discussed in Chapter One. A theory of democracy must include an interpretation of the act of voting if any praise or criticism of democracy is to be possible. The theoretical interpretation is distinct from an empirical account of voting behavior, and also…Read more
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22Book Review:The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance. Steven Shiffrin (review)Ethics 102 (4): 871-. 1992.
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29Introduction: Epistemic Approaches to DemocracyEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 5 (1): 1-4. 2008.
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297The persuasiveness of democratic majoritiesPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 3 (2): 131-142. 2004.Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent the other, then average …Read more
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5Controversy has recently erupted, at least in a recent story in the Independent, over the question of whether Brown's Philosophy Department has been inappropriately exclusionary of courses in other departments, of diverse philosophical traditions, and of non-white philosophers. These are questions well worth asking, although the article's critical stance requires some scrutiny. It is worth supplementing the article with some information that might help students think about whether they ought to …Read more
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161The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2012.This volume includes 22 new pieces by leaders in the field on both perennial and emerging topics of keen interest to contemporary political philosophers.
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143Reply to WiensEuropean Journal of Political Theory 15 (3): 353-362. 2016.In Human Nature and the Limits of Political Philosophy, I argued that justice might require things of people that they cannot bring themselves to do. A central step was to argue that this does not entail an inability to ‘do’ the putatively required thing. David Wiens challenges that argument of mine, and this piece is my reply.
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44:Cambridge Companion to RawlsEthics 114 (3): 608-615. 2004.John Rawls is the most significant and influential philosopher and moral philosopher of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly shaped contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice in philosophy, law, political science, economics and other social disciplines. In this exciting collection of new essays, many of the world's leading political and moral theorists discuss the full range of Rawls's contribution to the concepts of political and economic justice, democracy, li…Read more
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1236Opinion leaders, independence, and Condorcet's Jury TheoremTheory and Decision 36 (2): 131-162. 1994.
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463Liberal associationism and the rights of statesSocial Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 425-449. 2013.It is often argued that if one holds a liberal political philosophy about individual rights against the state and the community, then one cannot consistently say that a state that violates those principles is owed the right of noninterference. How could the rights of the collective trump the rights of individuals in a liberal view? I believe that this debate calls for more reflection, on the relation between liberalism and individualism. I will sketch a conception of liberalism in which there is…Read more
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37Democracy (edited book)Blackwell. 2001.Democracy brings together some of the most sophisticated thinking on democratic theory in one concise volume. Written by experts in the field, these contemporary readings are distinctively philosophical, but will appeal to students in historical, empirical, legal, or policy- oriented disciplines which deal with democratic theory.
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12Review of Steven Shiffrin: The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance. (review)Ethics 102 (4): 871-874. 1992.
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1254Political QualitySocial Philosophy and Policy 17 (1): 127. 2000.Political equality is in tension with political quality, and quality has recently been neglected. My thesis is that proper attention to the quality of democratic procedures and their outcomes requires that we accept substantive inequalities of political input in the interest of increasing input overall. Mainly, I hope to refute political egalitarianism, the view that justice or legitimacy requires substantive political equality, specifically equal availability of power or influence over collecti…Read more
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315Methodological moralism in political philosophyCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 385-402. 2017.
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164I Will If You Will: Leveraged Enhancements and Distributive JusticeIn Brian Feltham & John Cottingham (eds.), Partiality and impartiality: morality, special relationships, and the wider world, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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443The place of self-interest and the role of power in deliberative democracyJournal of Political Philosophy 18 (1): 64-100. 2009.No Abstract
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3048Debate: Liberalism, equality, and fraternity in Cohen's critique of RawlsJournal of Political Philosophy 6 (1). 1998.
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301On Sunstein's InfotopiaTheoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 56 (119): 14-29. 2009.Sunstein argues that democratic theory has recently rested its normative claims on a vast but empirically uninformed optimism about the ability of collective deliberation to lead to morally and rationally better decisions. Once that question is considered empirically, he argues, deliberation turns out to be mixed at best, and a disaster at worst. I want to suggest that Sunstein exaggerates the claims of the deliberative democrats, and interprets the empirical literature against deliberation in a…Read more
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10Legislative Intent and Other Essays on Law, Politics and MoralityPhilosophical Review 104 (4): 605. 1995.Gerald MacCallum taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin from 1961 until 1977. The stroke he suffered in that year prevented him from further teaching. He continued to write, even through the crippling effects of a second stroke, until his death in 1987. His final project was the Prentice Hall Foundations in Philosophy book, Political Philosophy. The present collection brings together papers, published and unpublished, spanning his writing career. I hope in this short space to convey so…Read more
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1441Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political PhilosophyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 39 (3): 207-237. 2011.
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176What Good Is It? Unrealistic Political Theory and the Value of Intellectual WorkAnalyse & Kritik 33 (2): 395-416. 2011.Suppose justice depends on some very unlikely good behavior. In that case the true (or correct, or best) theory of justice might have no practical value. But then, what good would it be? I consider analogies with science and mathematics in order to test various ways of tying their the value of intellectual work to practice, though I argue that these fail. If their value, or that of some political theory, is not practical then what is good about them? As for political theory, I consider the quest…Read more