Philip Pettit

This book examines an unlikely development in modern political philosophy: the adoption by a major national government of the ideas of a living political theorist. When José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero became Spain's opposition leader in 2000, he pledged that if his socialist party won power he would govern Spain in accordance with the principles laid out in Philip Pettit's 1997 book Republicanism, which presented, as an alternative to liberalism and communitarianism, a theory of freedom and government based on the idea of nondomination. When Zapatero was elected President in 2004, he invited Pettit to Spain to give a major speech about his ideas. Zapatero also invited Pettit to monitor Spanish politics and deliver a kind of report card before the next election. Pettit did so, returning to Spain in 2007 to make a presentation in which he gave Zapatero's government a qualified thumbs-up for promoting republican ideals. In this book, Pettit and José Luis Martí provide the historical background to these unusual events, explain the principles of civic republicanism in accessible terms, present Pettit's report and his response to some of its critics, and include an extensive interview with Zapatero himself. In addition, the authors discuss what is required of a political philosophy if it is to play the sort of public role that civic republicanism has been playing in Spain. An important account of a rare and remarkable encounter between contemporary political philosophy and real-world politics, this is also a significant work of political philosophy in its own right.

People ordinarily suppose that there are certain things they ought to believe and certain things they ought not to believe. In supposing this to be so, they make corresponding assumptions about their belief-forming capacities. They assume that they are generally responsive to what they think they ought to believe in the things they actually come to believe. In much the same sense, people ordinarily suppose that there are certain things they ought to desire and do and they make corresponding assumptions about their capacities to form desires and act on them. We chart these assumptions and argue that they entail that people are responsible and free on two fronts: they are free and responsible believers and free and responsible desirers.

Granted that desire is always present in the genesis of human action, is it something on the presence of which the agent always reflects? I may act on a belief without coming to recognize that I have the belief. Can I act on a desire without recognizing that I have the desire? In particular, can the desire have a motivational presence in my decision making, figuring in the background, as it were, without appearing in the content of my deliberation, in the foreground? We argue, perhaps unsurprisingly, that yes, desire can figure in the background without figuring in the foreground: we call this the strict background view of desire. But we then show, and this is where the surprise comes, that the strict background view of desire has significant implications for contemporary moral philosophy.

Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject.

Some contemporary theories treat phenomena like weakness of will, compulsion and wantonness as practical failures but not as failures of rationality: say, as failures of autonomy or whatever. Other current theories-the majority see the phenomena as failures of rationality but not as distinctively practical failures. They depict them as always involving a theoretical deficiency: a sort of ignorance, error, inattention or illogic. They represent them as failures which are on a par with breakdowns of theoretical reason; the failures may not have exact theoretical analogues, exact analogues in the breakdown of belief, but they are of essentially the same, cognitive kind. Our approach gives us quite a different view of things. The pathologies which we identify in our taxonomy are distinctively rational failures and distinctively practical failures; they are failures of pure practical reason.

The analysis of concepts is an important part of the philosophical exercise but has to be complemented by the allocation of a referent to any world-tracking concept: this will give an account of what constitutes the phenomenon tracked. But analysis generally leaves room for negotiation about the referent to be allocated, for two reasons. First, because it may underdetermine the specification of conditions that anything must satisfy if it is to count as a referent. And, second, because the specification chosen may itself underdetermine the property that constitutes the referent. The license that philosophy consequently enjoys has to be exercised on the basis of analytically independent criteria linked with the theory within which any realistic concept has to take its place. The lesson is illustrated schematically, it comments on concepts like those of causation, freewill, and value and in a case study of the concept of freedom. It connects with the line argued by a range of recent, more revisionary approaches to philosophy.

This chapter provides a background for the discussion of Wollstonecraft’s republicanism presented in the second half of the volume. The opening section looks at the sort of republican theory that dominated the English-speaking world in Wollstonecraft’s lifetime. The second appeals to Ibsen’s play _A Doll’s House_ to raise the question of whether a woman who lives under the power of her husband can count as a free person. The third sketches two established, non-republican views of freedom under which she can. The fourth section makes a case in defense of the republican way of thinking about freedom as an alternative to those views. And then the fifth section looks at the answer to the freedom question that that view of freedom would support.

We do good by bringing about welcome consequences, particularly disposition-dependent ones. Thus we give respect by acting out of the beneficent disposition not to interfere in one another’s personal choices. But while we do evil by bringing about unwelcome consequences, these are rarely disposition-dependent: they do not require that we act out of a maleficent disposition or that we conform to standards of malice in our behavior. This observation helps to explain the Knobe effect whereby we ascribe intentionality more readily to presumptively bad actions than to good. Thus to help the environment requires acting out of a helpful disposition, ensuring that you conform to beneficent standards. To harm the environment requires only that you create an environmental cost, breaching those standards: it does not require that you act out of the disposition of an environmental vandal, ensuring that you conform to a vandal’s standards.

How do the notions of programming and difference-making relate to one another? A higher-level property programs for an effect just in case, intuitively, the actual realizer of the property at any lower level gives rise to a realizer of the effect and any possible realizer at that level would also have done this. A higher-level property makes a difference to the effect just in case its presence programs for the effect and, in addition, its absence programs for the absence of the effect. Christian List and Peter Menzies argue for the capacity of the difference-making model to explain away the exclusion problem raised for physicalists by Jaegwon Kim. But the program model, developed in earlier work by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, offers a simpler and more straightforward way of handling the challenge.

According to standard versions of reason-responsiveness agents are fit to be held responsible for a failure to act as reasons require when they had the capacity to act in that way, there were no excuses available to hinder the exercise of that capacity, and still they failed to exercise it. But this analysis suggests that such a failure has to be a fluke that is due to sheer chance or an unknown glitch. And in that case there is no obvious reason to blame the agent for the failure. This chapter seeks to recast the reason-responsiveness approach so that it can deal with this crucial problem.

The justice of a society has two dimensions, social and political. Social justice dictates how well members should compare with one another within the basic structure of the society. Political justice dictates how far they should share in controlling the shape of that basic structure. The two ideals may be in competition, however: the democratic society that answers to your ideal of political justice, for example, may not endorse your ideal of social justice. And so they raise an issue of priority. This chapter offers three arguments for the priority of political justice, in particular for a certain version of democracy.