•  2612
    Republican Freedom and Contestatory Democratization
    In Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies Ian Shapiro, Ian Shapiro, Casiano Hacker-Cordón & Russell Hardin (eds.), Democracy's Value, Cambridge University Press. pp. 163-190. 1999.
  •  1200
    Freedom as antipower
    Ethics 106 (3): 576-604. 1996.
  •  954
    The Hard Problem of Responsibility
    In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2013.
  •  895
    The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. A…Read more
  •  853
    Varieties of Public Representation
    In Susan Stokes, Alexander Kirshner, Ian Shapiro & E. J. Wood (eds.), Political Representation, Cambridge University Press. pp. 61-89. 2010.
  •  828
    During the past decade ethical theory has been in a lively state of development, and three basic approaches to ethics - Kantian ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics - have assumed positions of particular prominence
  •  814
    Program explanation: A general perspective
    Analysis 50 (2): 107-17. 1990.
    Some properties are causally relevant for a certain effect, others are not. In this paper we describe a problem for our understanding of this notion and then offer a solution in terms of the notion of a program explanation
  •  788
    Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma and Republican Theory
    In James S. Fishkin & Peter Laslett (eds.), Debating Deliberative Democracy, Blackwel. pp. 138-162. 2003.
    The Ideal of Deliberative Democracy The Discursive Dilemma The Relevance of the Dilemma for Deliberative Democracy The Resolution in Republican Theory This Resolution and Other Arguments for the Ideal Notes.
  •  724
    Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility result
    Economics and Philosophy 18 (1): 89-110. 2002.
    Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that difficulty illustrates…Read more
  •  698
    Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 1997.
    This is the first full-length presentation of a republican alternative to the liberal and communitarian theories that have dominated political philosophy in recent years. The latest addition to the acclaimed Oxford Political Theory series, Pettit's eloquent and compelling account opens with an examination of the traditional republican conception of freedom as non-domination, contrasting this with established negative and positive views of liberty. The first part of the book traces the rise and d…Read more
  •  669
    Decision theory and folk psychology
    In Michael Bacharach & Susan Hurley (eds.), Essays in the Foundations of Decision Theory, Blackwell. pp. 147-175. 1991.
  •  661
    Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma
    Philosophical Issues 11 (1): 268-299. 2001.
    Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually vote, in the light of that debate, on whether or not to support the conclusion? Or does it recommend t…Read more
  •  628
    Group agents have been represented as expressive fictions by those who treat ascriptions of agency to groups as metaphorical; as pragmatic fictions by those who think that the agency ascribed to groups belongs in the first place to a distinct individual or set of individuals; and as theoretical fictions by those who think that postulating group agents serves no indispensable role in our theory of the social world. This paper identifies, criticizes and rejects each of these views, defending a str…Read more
  •  599
    The Conversable, Responsible Corporation
    In Eric Orts & Craig Smith (eds.), The Moral Responsibility of Firms, Oxford University Press. pp. 15-35. 2017.
  •  589
    Republican Political Theory
    In Andrew Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 112-131. 1997.
  •  579
    A Brief History of Liberty--And Its Lessons
    Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 17 5-21. 2016.
  •  569
    Political realism meets civic republicanism
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 331-347. 2017.
    The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper arg…Read more
  •  527
  •  524
    The Globalized Republican Ideal
    Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 9 (1): 47-68. 2016.
    The concept of freedom as non-domination that is associated with neo-republican theory provides a guiding ideal in the global, not just the domestic arena, and does so even on the assumption that there will continue to be many distinct states. It argues for a world in which states do not dominate members of their own people and, considered as a corporate body, no people is dominated by other agencies: not by other states and not, for example, by any international agency or multi-national corpora…Read more
  •  516
    Freedom and the State: Nanny or Nightwatchman?
    Public Health 129 (8): 1055-1060. 2015.
    There are two rival images often offered of the state. In one the state serves like a nanny to provide for the welfare of its members; in the other it requires people to look after themselves, providing only the service of a night-watchman. But this dichotomy, which is routinely invoked in debates about public health and welfare provision in general, is misleading. What the rival images turn on is not competing pictures of how the state should function in people's lives but competing pictures of…Read more
  •  514
    Three Methods of Ethics
    Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 721-723. 2001.
  •  508
    Freedom: psychological, ethical, and political
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 18 (4): 375-389. 2015.
    Freedom is sometimes cast as the psychological ideal that distinguishes human beings from other animals; sometimes as the ethical ideal that distinguishes some human beings from others; and sometimes as the political ideal that distinguishes some human societies from others. This paper is an attempt to put the three ideals in a common frame, revealing their mutual connections and differences.
  •  496
    Group agency and supervenience
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1): 85-105. 2006.
    Can groups be rational agents over and above their individual members? We argue that group agents are distinguished by their capacity to mimic the way in which individual agents act and that this capacity must “supervene” on the group members' contributions. But what is the nature of this supervenience relation? Focusing on group judgments, we argue that, for a group to be rational, its judgment on a particular proposition cannot generally be a function of the members' individual judgments on th…Read more
  •  485
    Deliberation and Decision
    In Constantine Sandis & Timothy O'Connor (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Decision ‐ Theoretic Picture The Decision ‐ plus ‐ Deliberation Picture A Common Mistake References.
  •  481
    Existentialism, quietism, and the role of philosophy
    In Brian Leiter (ed.), The Future for Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 304--327. 2004.
    In this essay I consider the question that divides quetism from existentialism and to defend a particular line on that question. The essay is in three main sections. In the first I set out a view of philosophy under which it grows out of reflection on the views that shape ordinary practice. In the second section I outline a theory as to how exactly practice commits us to such views. And then in the third section I argue on the basis of that account that, notwithstanding serious difficulties, phi…Read more
  •  479
    Three Mistakes about Doing Good (And Bad)
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 35 (1): 1-25. 2018.
  •  479
    Criminalization in Republican Theory
    In R. A. Duff, Lindsay Farmer, S. E. Marshall, Massimo Renzo & Victor Tadros (eds.), Criminalization: The Political Morality of Criminal Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 132-150. 2014.