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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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31Democracy (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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1202Political 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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280Methodological moralism in political philosophyCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 385-402. 2017.
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430The 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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142I 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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2997Debate: Liberalism, equality, and fraternity in Cohen's critique of RawlsJournal of Political Philosophy 6 (1). 1998.
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295On 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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23Legislative 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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146What 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
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1873Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political PhilosophyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 39 (3): 207-237. 2011.
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1162The insularity of the reasonable: Why political liberalism must admit the truthEthics 108 (2): 252-275. 1998.
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278Democratic Authority: A Philosophical FrameworkPrinceton University Press. 2008.Democracy is not naturally plausible. Why turn such important matters over to masses of people who have no expertise? Many theories of democracy answer by appealing to the intrinsic value of democratic procedure, leaving aside whether it makes good decisions. In Democratic Authority, David Estlund offers a groundbreaking alternative based on the idea that democratic authority and legitimacy must depend partly on democracy's tendency to make good decisions.Just as with verdicts in jury trials, Es…Read more
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7Reply to Copp, Gaus, Richardson, and EdmundsonEthics 121 (2): 354-389. 2011.This piece is a response to four essays that critically discuss my book Democratic Authority. In addition to responding to their specific criticisms, it takes up several methodological issues that put some of the critiques in a broader context. Among the issues discussed are “normative consent,” which I offer as a new theory of authority; the “general acceptability requirement,” which advances a broadly Rawlsian approach to political justification; and methodological questions about theory build…Read more
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20Book Review:Private Consciences and Public Reasons. Kent Greenawalt (review)Ethics 107 (2): 358-. 1997.
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612Justificatory Liberalism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 821-825. 1999.
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1600The survival of egalitarian justice in John Rawls's political liberalismJournal of Political Philosophy 4 (1). 1996.
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948Debate: On Christiano's the constitution of equalityJournal of Political Philosophy 17 (2): 241-252. 2009.No Abstract
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10On Sunstein's InfotopiaTheoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 56 (120): 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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25What's So Rickety? Richardson's Non‐Epistemic DemocracyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 204-204. 2007.
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954Introduction: Epistemic approaches to democracyEpisteme 5 (1). 2008.The papers published in this special issue can fairly be unified under the heading “Epistemic Democracy,” but there is more variety among them than this might indicate. They exhibit the broad range of ways in which epistemological considerations are figuring in contemporary philosophical discussions of democracy. The authors range from young and promising to established and distinguished. I'd like to introduce a few of the issues that run through the papers, sprinkling references to the actual p…Read more