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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 The present collection brings together papers, published and unpublished, spanning his writing career.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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1874Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political PhilosophyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 39 (3): 207-237. 2011.
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148What 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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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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1164The insularity of the reasonable: Why political liberalism must admit the truthEthics 108 (2): 252-275. 1998.
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20Book Review:Private Consciences and Public Reasons. Kent Greenawalt (review)Ethics 107 (2): 358-. 1997.
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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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613Justificatory Liberalism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 821-825. 1999.
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951Debate: On Christiano's the constitution of equalityJournal of Political Philosophy 17 (2): 241-252. 2009.No Abstract
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1604The 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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959Introduction: 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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26What's So Rickety? Richardson's Non‐Epistemic DemocracyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 204-204. 2007.
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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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544Democracy & 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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409Reply 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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630Jeremy 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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598Democratic 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.