Dorothea Gädeke

Abstract: The article aims to sharpen the neo-republican contribution to international political thought by challenging Pettit’s view that only representative states may raise a valid claim to non-domination in their external relations. The argument proceeds in two steps: First I show that, conceptually speaking, the domination of states, whether representative or not, implies dominating the collective people at least in its fundamental, constitutive power. Secondly, the domination of states – and thus of their peoples – cannot be justified normatively in the name of promoting individual non-domination because such a compensatory rationale misconceives the notion of domination in terms of a discrete exercise of power instead of as an ongoing power relation. This speaks in favour of a more inclusive law of peoples than Pettit (just as his liberal counterpart Rawls) envisages: In order to accommodate the claim of collective peoples to non-domination it has to recognize every state as a member of the international order.

Is normative theory grounded in ontology and if so, how? Taking a debate between Kwame Gyekye and Thaddeus Metz as my point of departure, my aim in this article is to show that something normative does indeed follow from ontological views: The social ontological, I maintain, circumscribes the normative without, however, fully determining its content. My argument proceeds in two steps: First, I argue that our social ontological position constrains what kind of normative theory we may plausibly defend. A relational ontology as defended by Gyekye entails a relational normative theory, whereas an atomist ontology calls for an individualist normative approach and a collectivist ontology for a strong communitarian one. Second, this link between the ontological and the normative has substantive implications for how to interpret the normative content of a theory; it entails interpreting normative values in light of the appropriate kind of normative thought. I illustrate the importance of this implication by showing that it suggests a decidedly relational reading of the core value of well-being in Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism, that resolves the alleged tension between communal and individual values in his account.

The aim of this chapter is to show how what I call critical republicanism can be developed on the basis of Pettit’s neo-republicanism. On the one hand, I argue that with regard to all three of the most important elements of a republican theory of non-domination, its normative core, the conception of domination, and its institutional implications, Pettit’s neo-republicanism does contain a powerful critical potential, too easily dismissed by some of his critics. On the other hand, I show how this critical potential can be strengthened by reconceptualizing each of the elements of his theory of domination from a perspective inspired by the Kantian line of republican thought and contemporary Frankfurt School-style critical theory.

In The Robust Demands of the Good Pettit claims that the three goods he takes to be central to the good, namely attachment, virtue and respect, share a common structure: they are robustly demanding in that they require the provision of an associated benefit not just under actual but across various possible circumstances. The aim of this paper is to show that the unified account of the good misconstrues the nature of respect. First, I argue that Pettit’s account of respect as robust non-interference cannot account for the particularly robust kind of robustness that respect requires and fails to clarify the relation between respect and freedom. Second, drawing on Pettit’s earlier work, I propose to reconceive of respect as the robust provision of discursive address. This account solves the ambiguities of Pettit’s account of respect. However, it suggests that the particularly robust demands of respect are demands of the right, not the good.

Imagine you are walking through a park. Suddenly, a mugger points a gun at you, threatening to shoot you if you do not hand over your valuables. Is this an instance of domination? Many authors working within the neo-republican framework - including Philip Pettit himself - are inclined to say 'yes'. After all, the mugger case seems to be a paradigmatic example of what it means to be at someone's mercy. However, I argue that this conclusion is based on a misleading, interactional account of domination that misconceives its structural character. Domination, I maintain, is a structurally constituted form of power. Whether the mugger in the park dominates you or not can only be established by analysing the wider power structures in which your interaction is embedded.