The following two thoughts are prompted by reading the first chapter of Pettit’s Republican Freedom, Talisse’s criticism of Pettit (“Impunity and Domination: A Puzzle for Republicanism”), and (the first two sections of) an unpublished essay by Derek Bowman on Pettit’s ideas about republican freedom and non-domination (“The Modality of (Republican) Freedom: Non-Domination As Effective Rights Recognition”). And by discussing Pettit’s ideas of domination and republican freedom with Derek.
(1) I take republican-style freedom to be something like this (and thus probably not what Pettit takes it to be on a consistent basis):
the social condition of custom and law providing reliable assurance that one will not be dominated by private parties or by the government (or by other inescapable customary or institutional elements in society).
This is not merely the absence of domination (which might occur by happenstance or through some different means). It is not clear to me that Pettit’s account has it that republican freedom is specifically the (desirable) assurance condition not just the (desirable) basal condition. But I think we should go with the assurance condition (and I think Pettit does sometimes).
(2) I take domination to be a species of actual social relationship, not a species of potential social relationship (as Pettit would have it, the potential social relationship is the agent having the capacity to interfere with the patient in certain ways that count as “arbitrary”). Here is my very different first-shot account:
X dominates Y just in case, across some significant-enough stretch of time and social interaction between X and Y, X, through both intentionally interfering with Y’s decisions and actions and through having the continuing power to do so in the future, intentionally and from improper motive, achieves reliable control over what Y does (across some range of actions).
‘Improper motive’, though something of a place-holder, correctly fails to render justified paternalism as domination. This kind of account has the advantage of not having to say that X can dominate Y by (proverbially) just sitting there. Yet it preserves power or capacity itself as something that does significant work in constituting dominance (thus achieving control, perhaps prompting feelings or humiliation or attitudes of servility, etc.).
The lucky slave case – properly specifed to eliminate all actual interference of the relevant sort – is interesting. The master has what we might call public normative license to order the slave to do all sorts of things (and to sell the slave to others, etc.). That is what the master social status and the slave social status are. This is similar to your status when you visit my house: I have public, consensus normative license to require you to remove your shoes before entering (and to require you to do all sorts of other stuff) – whether or not I actually do so. But it is not the case that I automatically dominate my houseguests. The lucky slave case is a bit different but, quite plausibly, the lucky slave, though dominated by society due to his status (a whole nuther kettle of fish) is not dominated by his master. So this case need not push us toward more of a Pettit-style, mere-capacity account of what domination is. (My view of this case is somewhat similar to Talisse’s.)
(As something of a side-note: a prominent part of the institutional protection against domination (and perhaps against other sorts of unjustified interference) offered by a regime of republican freedom might be guarding against private and government power that is ripe for abuse – not just providing protection through more direct prevention of the abuse (say through intervention, punishment, coercing recompense from the perp, etc.). We might include this element in a conception of republican freedom that is more specific about just what it is important for society or the state to assure for the sake of securing against domination and why.)
Policy of Truth 
I would say that an account of republicanism needs a lot more than a placeholder to deal with the issue of paternalism. A basic problem with republicanism is that it seems inherently and objectionably paternalistic: non-dominative interferences don’t diminish freedom, and the only constraint required to avoid domination is that the paternalistic agent forswear “arbitrarily” subjecting the other person to his will. That leaves enormous territory open to paternalism. You can unjustifiably (and without malice of any kind) hugely diminish someone’s freedom (in any ordinary sense) through well-meaning paternalism that is rule-guided, hence not arbitrary. His account itself has to offer a criterion of justifiable and unjustifiable paternalism. He can’t outsource that to some other account, and treat it as a separate issue. We need to know: does justified paternalism diminish or enhance freedom? And how so, either way? How exactly does he (or republicans generally) avoid unjustified paternalism? I would flag this as a problem for Pettit that I’m not sure he has the resources to handle.
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Pettit should (and maybe does in his better spots) admit that securing republican freedom does diminish non-interference-type liberty: at the descriptive level, at the normative level of actions that as a default or in most cases could not be permissibly interfered with, at the level of institutional protection or assurance of this latter normative sort of liberty. Hiding the trade-off through stipulation does no one any favors.
If the right sort of tracking of the patient’s interests simply blocks something that is close to domination from being domination, only this one way of problematically rendering apparently-impermissible paternalism permissible gets blocked. So a door is opened to permissible (justified, advisable) paternalism — and perhaps too much of it — but more is required to get it. So I think we need to look at what this “something more” might be in Pettit (and just in general or plausibly) in order to make stick a charge of “too easy to justify paternalism.”
(A bit out of character, but one who emphasizes the value of non-domination or republican-style liberty could hold that the main problem with paternalism is that it usually constitutes impermissible interference!)
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I think it’s clear that Pettit faces a problem with paternalism. To be freedom-diminishing, paternalism has to be a case of domination. To be a case of domination, it has to make the paternalized patient subject to the arbitrary will of the paternalist. But very few cases of paternalism will satisfy that condition. A sincere paternalist is not going to act “arbitrarily,” and is going to invoke the patient’s best interests as the justification for his paternalism. So what is involved can’t be reduced to mere subjection to the paternalist’s will. Still, paternalism is objectionable, and what’s objectionable about it is intuitively how it diminishes freedom. At least prima facie, this is a problem for Pettit’s account.
The problem is made worse by your revision of Pettit in the other post. Your account requires domination to involve A’s cultivating submission in B. But there’s just a mismatch between that motivation and the motivation behind paternalism. The paternalist is trying to promote the patient’s interests, not cultivate submission in the patient. At best the paternalist wants to “cultivate submission” in the Pickwickian sense that he wants the patient to be cooperative enough so that the paternalist can succeed with minimum application of force. But that’s true of all paternalism as such: if paternalism is ever justified, then it’s instrumentally rational for the paternalist to want to cultivate Pickwickian “submission” (cooperativeness) in the patient. If that degree of “cultivating submission” was domination, all paternalism would be domination. But setting that aside, very little paternalism will end up being domination. Yet a fair bit of it might still be objectionable.
That is a suspicion, not an iron-clad argument. But it seems to me that the suspicion is warranted, and he’s got a high bar to clear.
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Not all objectionable paternalism is objectionable because it is a type of domination. Paternalism can be objectionable due to its interfering with the patient (or for other reasons) as well as due to its constituting the domination of the patient. So clearing an instance of paternalism of being domination need not make it unobjectionable.
Pettit needs the interest-tracking condition because otherwise his concept of domination (as a power to control or interfere) includes justified paternalism (like that of parents with respect to their children) in it (thus falsely rendering justified paternalism as unjustified). So: when the interest-tracking condition is present, you don’t have domination — but rather, intuitively, a kind of paternalistic (power of) control or interference. But he doesn’t (or shouldn’t) say that you have a kind of paternalism that is justified. You just have paternalism that is not rendered unjustified by being a case of domination.
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