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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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611Justificatory Liberalism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 821-825. 1999.
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943Debate: On Christiano's the constitution of equalityJournal of Political Philosophy 17 (2): 241-252. 2009.No Abstract
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1595The survival of egalitarian justice in John Rawls's political liberalismJournal of Political Philosophy 4 (1). 1996.
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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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951Introduction: 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
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7There is a growing literature under the banner of "deliberative democracy," and Paul Weithman suggests that much of it is based on, or at least implies, a critique of the kind of theory of justice pioneered by Rawls 1. The issue at stake is whether a democratic political theory can admit independent normative standards that apply to and constrain democratic decisions. A certain kind of critic thinks independent standards are anti-democratic. Weithman's defense of Rawlsian theory against this cha…Read more
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14The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and HabermasPolitical Theory 20 (4): 694-697. 1992.
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541Democracy & Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, Geoffery Brennan and Loren Lomasky. Cambridge University Press, 1993, 225 + x pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 12 (1): 113. 1996.
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400Reply 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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628Jeremy Waldron on law and disagreementPhilosophical Studies 99 (1): 111-128. 2000.Waldron argues that recent treatments of justice have neglected reasonable disagreement about justice itself. So Waldron offers a procedural account of democratic legitimacy, in which contending views of justice can be brought together to arrive at a decision without deciding which one is correct. However, if there is reasonable disagreement about everything, then this includes his preferred account of legitimacy. On the other hand, it is not clear that Waldron is right to count so much disagree…Read more
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594Democratic theoryIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 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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21Book Review:The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance. Steven Shiffrin (review)Ethics 102 (4): 871-. 1992.
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246The 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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26Introduction: Epistemic Approaches to DemocracyEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 5 (1): 1-4. 2008.
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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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149The 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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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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115Reply 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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1199Opinion leaders, independence, and Condorcet's Jury TheoremTheory and Decision 36 (2): 131-162. 1994.