Here’s a way to think of domination that might accord with our intuitions about the paradigm or unambiguous cases (and help us explain the borderline, extended or special cases). The core idea is that, when X’s governing consideration in deliberating about what to do is what Y wants X to do, X is in a certain objectionable submissive relationship with Y. But perhaps in order for Y to dominate X, something like this must be true: Y intentionally (and successfully) cultivates the submissive relationship with X – or at least cultivates it with some knowledge of what she is doing or of what is happening. Arguably, this is something objectionable (and hence something that one is required not to do, that one has usually-dispositive, requirement-style reason not to do, something like that).
Is this characterization any good at covering the paradigm cases and shedding light on the borderline cases?
(This is not a pure capacity view like Pettit’s. If one is to dominate, one has to do things – though not necessarily actions that are instances of interfering with the patient’s actions. But: interest-threatening power, including the power to interfere, could, it seems, do quite a bit of work in generating the submissive mindset – and this might be one of the more common mechanisms for generating submission/domination. And: it would seem that the levers of social expectations, norms and institutions could be more or less intentionally used to cultivate submission/domination relationships between groups of people, yielding the institutional-injustice-y sorts of domination. It seems that this kind of characterization of domination is well-positioned to do a lot of the work that an adequate account should do.)
Policy of Truth 
As I said in our discussion, this seems to me to be overly narrow conception of domination–a species of domination, not the thing as such.
You can have domination without any self-conscious attempt to cultivate submission. Suppose that I am the dominating presence in a relationship. I crowd out the other person’s agency simply by expressing myself, without knowingly cultivating any submission in them. I could still (easily) dominate them.
You can have domination with total indifference to the person being dominated. Suppose I’m a manager and my employee is totally dependent on me for his job. The employee lives his life in anxiety about my decisions, but I never once think about him. I might still dominate him, simply by virtue of wielding the power I have over him. Assuming total dependency on me, I dominate him.
It seems to me beside the point that we can characterize the latter relationship as “dependency.” We can, but it doesn’t follow that our characterizing it that way entails that it doesn’t involve domination. Dependency and domination could be (probably are) correlatives. Cases where X is dependent on Y might always or often overlap with cases where Y dominates X.
The account you’re giving takes highly personalized forms of domination as paradigms. Personalized domination is sufficient for domination, but not necessary, and not the only paradigm.
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There is something to be said for getting the personal-type cases right, before tackling the more complex group/social/institutional cases. In your two personal-type cases, both would be cases of domination/dependency relationships without anyone doing the dominating (because the intention or quasi-intention condition is not met). I don’t think these are paradigm cases of domination.
But I’m happy enough to just throw my hands up in the air and start stipulating and evaluating the adequacy of the stipulations. Is the normative upshot of these two cases (inadvertently causing myself and someone else be in a dependency relationship with me on top versus my intentionally or quasi-intentionally causing this to happen) the same? I’m not sure it is. In any case, that question seems relevant to whether my stipulation is adequate to the phenomena. Whether we call the more objective or unintentionally caused or maintained relationship one of domination ultimately is not important.
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It seems to me that your basic assumption is that there are no paradigmatic cases of domination that take place through indifference or moral blindness. That strikes me as very counter-intuitive.
Consider a parallel case, that of cruelty. I think it would be generally accepted that there are at least two kinds of cruelty, both equally paradigmatic. One kind involves deliberate, calculated, malice aforethought. But another kind can take place through sheer indifference to the welfare of others.
Imagine two zookeepers. The first cages a lion in a substandard cage, then delights in tormenting it. The second cages another lion in an even tinier space, then neglects it. The adverse effect on the lion is the same. Stipulate that the effects are visible to both zookeepers. The first delights in the lion’s suffering. The second doesn’t care. They’re both equally and obviously cruel. The difference lies in the flagrancy of the first zookeeper’s behavior, not in whether each satisfies the predication-conditions for “cruelty.”
Or consider a case of child abuse. One abuser torments the child, the other neglects her to the point of bringing harm on the child that is worse than the first abuser. Little point would be served in insisting that the first is “abuse” and the second merely “neglect” because the first expresses active, discernible malice and the second seems indifferent. Both paradigmatically cruel, both paradigmatically abusive.
In the domination case, a person who indifferently and impersonally (but knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally) wields the power of life and death over someone else and exercises it that way strikes me as obviously dominating the second person. What else could they be said to be doing? They don’t need to have cultivated submission in the dominated person, precisely because they command a power over the dominated person that doesn’t require submission. The irony is that your picture of domination suggests a dominator who has to go through the tedium of conditioning the victim to domination. But a more powerful dominator wouldn’t need to do that. He would just directly exercise the power required to do what he wanted to do. It’s counter-intuitive that on your view, a more dominant dominator is less engaged in domination than a less dominant one.
I don’t think this is mere quibbling about the meaning of words. You have a narrow view of domination, I have a broad one. The latter sort of view will not just include more things under the concept of “domination,” but likely see domination as much more central to human life than your view. It’s not something that merely lurks in some dark corners here and there. It’s everywhere. If so, there is something odd about Pettit’s view from the start. Can a theory of government really govern something so ubiquitous and all-encompassing? It’s like trying to govern dishonesty. I’m skeptical.
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(1) I’m quite sympathetic to your criticism of Pettit (and republicanism) at the end there!
(2) My characterization of domination here is meant to include any intentional or knowing/quasi-intentional patterns of attitude and action that generate or maintain (the relevant sort of) submission. I should probably include something about the quality of the motivations behind this intention (or quasi-intention). I didn’t because it is hard to think of cases of intentionally causing such submissiveness “for good enough reason” that one might be justified in it. But I probably should add something to the effect that either malice or negligence is behind the intention (if you like, insert flowery language about appreciating the humanity of the patient or whatnot). I certainly don’t mean to exclude the negligence cases of causing/maintaining such submission.
(3) I’m excluding just the objective pattern of attitudes (and actions) that constitute being submissive in the relevant way. The presence of this pattern is still a bad thing — and often perhaps even an unjust state of affairs, a state of affairs that relevantly-situated persons have some kind of obligation to do something about — but it is not one person (or agent) doing something impermissible to another person (or agent) by dominating them. And so I’m excluding many cases of society-scale and smaller-scale institutional injustice.
(4) What about a Mr. Magoo type of scenario (where X causes Y to be submissive to X in the relevant way, but through sheer happenstance; maybe X does this in trying to rake his garden or order a hot dog from a vendor)? I’m meaning to exclude these cases, too. The intention (or slightly weaker) condition is not met. It’s a case of incidental causation via agency. Also the motivation behind the action — the negligence, if we are to call it that — is not of the culpable sort.
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I think there’s plenty of room for domination even after you account for intentional cases, quasi-intentional ones, plus the malicious and reckless ones. If Mr Magoo is specifically blind to moral reality, then the domination involved in Magoo-cases doesn’t take place merely by happenstance: Magoo’s moral blindness is the relevant explanatory variable. Moral blindness can cause indifference, and indifference can cause domination. That’s what’s going on in Pettit’s invocation of Ibsen on p. 60 of the book
I had written all of my previous comments before I’d read chapter 2 of the book. It turns out that Pettit invokes almost exactly the same examples as I did. On p. 57, he gives a case of employment at-will. I agree with him on that: employment-at-will in the context of asymmetrical bargaining power strikes both of us as an obvious case of domination.
On p. 54, he gives the example of exploiting someone’s needs to drive a hard bargain. That’s close enough to my child abuse case to cover it (the parent isn’t bargaining with the child, but doesn’t have to; he’s exploiting the child’s needs). So construed, domination doesn’t require cultivating a submissive relationship; it just requires consciousness of asymmetrical power and a desire to use it, even in a one-and-done interaction. It’s worth noting that the person doing the dominating may not personally be all that powerful. She could just occupy an institutional position that gives her power during the work day. Once she clocks out, she reverts to powerlessness.
For instance, suppose a bill collector calls you, looking to collect on a debt. You hem and haw about payment, so the collector gives you a 24 hour deadline to pay the debt, or else threatens to send your account into “Bad Debt.” Obviously, sending your account into Bad Debt has adverse ramifications on your credit rating, which adversely affects your life. It could make you bankrupt, make you homeless, make you unable to get employment or health care, drive otherwise promising girlfriends away, etc.
All Collector needs is consciousness of her power to do this plus the actual power to do it. Suppose you can’t possibly pay within 24 hours. So the deadline comes, and her computer is set to remind her about you once it does (otherwise she’d forget–that’s how little she cares about the whole thing). She clicks her mouse a few times and sends your account into Bad Debt. And then the Bad Debt machinery starts, to your detriment. Then Ms Collector forgets all about you and moves on.
On Pettit’s account and mine, Collector has dominated you. This strikes me as an obvious case, but it’s a totally impersonal interaction. There is no malice on her part, no cultivation of submission, nothing even close to resembling some stereotypical slave-like or BDSM-like relationship. But a few mouse clicks on Collector’s part can change your life. The lesson here is that in the modern world, you can dominate people without knowing who they are, or caring. Basically, I help do this at work every day, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, on people recovering from hospitalizations. I feel bad for the people we’re dunning. I hate being part of an industry designed to fuck up people’s lives. But that doesn’t change what I’m doing. I dominate people without wanting to, or without trying. But there’s no denying I do what I do.
On p. 60, Pettit invokes an example I’ve heard him invoke before in talks he’s given–Thorvald’s domination of Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. This example almost exactly parallels the first example in my first comment above: domination without self-conscious attempt to dominate. So obviously, I agree with his account of it.
Despite a few quibbles, I basically agree with Pettit on what domination is. What I reject is his insistence that freedom = non-domination, or his easy assumption that freedom-as-non-domination can be turned into a political ideal.
One quibble I have is one that I think you share: it strikes me as implausible to regard the sheer capacity to dominate as tantamount to domination per se (condition 1 on p. 52). I think Pettit should just drop this condition. He tries to defend it, but it’s hopeless.
I also think that Pettit should drop his “common knowledge” condition on pp. 58-61. There’s no need to rule out the possibility that some domination is basically hidden from view.
And Pettit is unclear or inconsistent about paternalism. On p. 53, he says that domination is “intended by the interferer to worsen the agent’s choice situation by changing the range of options available…” But then on p. 60, he tells us that Thorvald dominates Nora despite his belief that his “domination is good for her.” The first formulation entails that sincere paternalism can never involve domination. The second entails that some sincere paternalism does involve domination. Both things can’t be true.
But my bigger problem is with the idea that non-domination can function as a viable political ideal. One problem is that Pettit really seems to underestimate how incredibly paternalistic his account ends up being, how much power it blithely hands over to the State in the optimistic hope that doing so will be a good thing. It won’t.
The other is that I think Pettit underestimates how much work his State will have to do to eradicate domination. How, for instance, do you get rid of the domination involved in bill collecting? It seems to me that Pettit faces a dilemma here. Either the goal he has in mind is politically impossible (ultimately, you can’t get rid of the dark side of bill collecting), or it’s to be made feasible by re-definition (properly regulated bill collecting is to be re-defined as mere interference, not domination). This dilemma suggests to me that Pettit will have more trouble applying his account to the modern state than he admits (pp. 95-97).
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(A) MR MAGOO, ETC. On the kind of approach that I’m wondering about here (and find at least somewhat promising), there is the distinction between (a) X being submissive to Y (in some relevant way, to some relevant extent) and (b) Y dominating X (due to Y doing things that establish or maintain X’s submission to Y in the right way).
It seems right that, if Y should know that PHI-ing will maintain X’s submission to Y and Y performs PHI, then Y’s PHI-ing is objectionable. Hence, in this kind of case, Y plausibly dominates X. So, yes, there is a Mr. Magoo case in which Mr Magoo dominates someone. But I don’t think this describes the typical Mr Magoo case because Mr. Magoo bumbles around innocently. He causes the submissive relationship, but not in the right way.
We get a similar result — submissive relationship but without anyone dominating anyone — if there is some other cause (but Magoo is the beneficiary). By happenstance, Mary might be submissive to Magoo in that she always second-guesses her decisions and actions and is highly motivated to shape them according to what she takes would please Mr. Magoo. I don’t think this is a case of Mary being dominated by Mr. Magoo.
(To an extent, I’ve just presented theory-independent grounds for distinguishing excessively submissive or deferential relationships from domination relationships. But part of my point is simply to indicate how the type of view presented would go. It needs to make such a distinction and has it that domination consists in the agent causing the submission/deference relationship in the right way.)
(B) EMPLOYMENT AT WILL ETC. Does the mere power to terminate employment at the will of the employer get us to the employer dominating the employee? I don’t think so. The kind of approach that I’m exploring here might say this: beyond the employer simply having power over the employee, this power is known by both and affects how the employee and employer behave at work (the former more deferential to the latter, the latter treating the former worse than she would otherwise — at least in the context of the employer having greater bargaining power due to an abundance of relevant labor or whatnot). The question is whether the employer is doing things that maintain this excessive-deference/worse-treatment relationship and knows (or should know) that these things maintain it. I think usually the answer is yes. Every time he treats the employee worse than he would otherwise, taking advantage of the situation, this condition is satisfied to some extent. The condition would be satisfied more strongly across a whole pattern of relevant attitudes and actions. In this way, we move away from the innocent-bumbling Mr. Magoo model fitting very well. In this way, an intuitive verdict of domination is upheld, though the domination does not consist in the mere power (grounded in law) of the employer to terminate the employee at will.
*****
Due to time considerations, I’ll leave it at that. I’ll think more about the other cases as I read through the next chapters in the Pettit.
(Your considerations have convinced me, at least for now, that an agent can dominate by way of establishing or maintaining a deferential relationship by taking these and those actions when she should have known that taking them would have this effect. That accounts for a greater range of relationships that intuitively count as agent dominating patient. When Mr. Magoo is morally blind as well as physically blind, this might well lead to his dominating instead of merely being causally implicated in a relationship of excessive deference or whatnot.)
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On Magoo cases, I think we just need to distinguish culpable and non-culpable versions of Magoo-hood.
On employment at will, and “sheer capacity” dominations, I’m a little torn here. Put another way, I think we have to distinguish cases. I think I disagree with Pettit that the sheer capacity to interfere with someone on an arbitrary basis should be part of the definition of “domination.” In many contexts, perhaps most, the sheer possession of a capacity to dominate minus does not (in my view) by itself entail actual domination. But Pettit says that context is relevant (p. 53), and I have to agree that there are contexts in which sheer possession does amount to domination. Or alternatively, I guess I would say that the act that constitutes or gives possession of a certain capacity is sufficient to indicate domination.
Imagine that I have a large property, call it a 70 acre farm. Let’s say it’s a very low crime neighborhood. One day, a well-armed 50,000 person army mysteriously shows up, encamps on my property, and begins to set up heavy armaments, oddly including a few missile silos. The neighbors politely ask what is going on, and I mysteriously go mute. The neighbors persist: “You know, Irfan, this is a little concerning.” I laugh and hang up. Then you notice that I’m flying a Hamas flag on the flag pole. Within short order, I have more firepower on my farm than the National Guard, and curiously enough, all of my weapons are precisely such as to take out the local police and National Guard. By coincidence, all of my blog posts are really angry about Gaza. I mean, really angry. But I threaten no one, and take no overt actions of an aggressive nature.*
I would say that this military build-up amounts to domination. You could either say that the action of gathering such an army does the trick, or that the sheer presence of the army does so. But either way, having that kind of militarized presence on my farm is sufficient for domination, even absent any overt indication of a desire to go on a rampage.
The underlying principle is that asymmetrical possession of weaponry with offensive capacities is often sufficient for domination, even absent any clear intent to use it. The possession of the weapon just is a declaration of intent to use it. There’s no other intelligible reason to possess weaponry of that kind or quantity except to dominate.
Though employment-at-will is not literally a weapon, I would say that the preceding principle is more clearly exemplified in the case of employment at will than it is of having a 50,000 person army on your property. In the case of the army, you could always adduce the (disingenuous) excuse of having it for purely defensive reasons rather than to dominate anyone. You could say, “I want an army to avoid domination by the State.” In context, that would be absurd, but it is logically possible. Whereas there is only one rationale for having employment-at-will: to fire people at will. A company that declares that it has a policy of employing at will is, in that declaration, declaring an intent to fire at will. So either the sheer possession of the capacity amounts to domination, or declaring that you have it does so. You don’t need anything more.
You say:
I think the answer is unquestionably “no.” The strategy you’re ascribing to the dominating employer would almost never be employed by an employer intent to dominate through the at-will doctrine. Employing your strategy would be instrumentally irrational–it would defeat the whole purpose of employment at will.
The whole point of employment-at-will (or termination-at-will) is to maintain an element of both domination and surprise over your workforce. You want them to maximize output by giving them the impression that the harder they work, the better they will be rewarded. But you deliberately want there to be an element of pure caprice in the equation. You don’t want them to think that you’re actually committed to giving them anything. You’re not. But you also don’t want to give them the certainty that you will pull the trigger without reason. You want them suspended in a state of limbo that says, “Anything goes, but here I am, so I may as well stay here, work my ass off, and hope that it pays off.”
If I’m your boss and you’re my employee, I can fire you at will. I don’t need to make that “known” to you, or drag you through some process to make you learn the score. Nor do I have to cultivate any sense of submission in you. I certainly don’t want to telegraph my specific intentions to you. All I want you to know is: I’m the boss. The sanction of termination-at-will does all the work of domination for me from the first minute of your employment without my having to do anything special to you. You know, from minute 1, that you could be fired for literally any reason or none at all. So it would be counter-purposive for The Boss to go through a process of “teaching” you that you owe me deference, or cultivating any trait of submission in you. The uncertainty of our relationship is the whole point of the at-will arrangement. I might be the kind of boss who rewards you fairly for your industry, and gives you years of job security. Or I might be the kind who exploits you and fires you because you failed to kiss ass on a single unpredictable, unannounced occasion. The whole point is to leave you guessing so as to induce you to gamble on the first option while leaving me the option of using the second whenever I want.
In that sense, my domination of you arises either from the sheer fact that you are employed at will, or at best, from the company’s “act” of declaring that it operates by an at-will policy. Understood in this way, employment at will is a weapon for maximizing worker productivity through domination that gives the appearance of equal freedom: “You can leave whenever you want, and I can fire you whenever you want, so we’re both in the same boat.” The at-will doctrine gives the impression that the whole proposition is true while ensuring that only the second conjunct is ever true. In practice, that’s all it’s meant to do. It has no other purpose.
So I think Pettit is right about this case. Employment at will is literally like a contract whose terms change every few hours at the discretion of one party but not the other. I would say: just having that power and implicitly agreeing to use it, is domination.
Having granted that, however, I don’t necessarily feel pushed into Pettit’s conception of freedom. A better way of handling this situation than Pettit’s might be to retain the ideal of freedom as non-interference, but regulate contracts through a doctrine of unconscionability. A totally unregulated form of employment-at-will might end up being unconscionable. The problem then gets relocated or resolved within the law of contracts, not by rejecting the ideal of freedom as non-interference. In general, I think Pettit has a strawman conception of freedom as non-interference that underestimates the resources available for dealing with the problems he brings up.
*Note that this is a hypothetical example. I do not have a 70 acre farm.
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I haven’t had time to go over this in much detail. But you are pushing me in a good direction in developing this kind of account of domination. Much thanks! I now like the following formulation better than the one I initially put forth:
X knowingly (or should-knowingly) participating in and benefiting (in some respect, even if one does not like it, objects to it, etc.) from Y’s excessive deference toward or submission to X.
So we can drop the promotion (or knowing promotion) condition — and hence anything like intentional promotion — for core cases that suffice for having domination, not just Y being objectionably, excessively deferential or submissive. This is still consistent with the broad kind of characterization of domination that I have going here because we have: (a) a bad or objectionable motivational and deliberative mindset in Y of undue deference toward or submission to X that requires (b) X to do something with respect to it (and to Y) in order for there to be domination. If Y is relevantly deferential or submissive and X just sits there and does nothing (even, I think, if X knows about it) then there is no domination.
I wonder how well this does? I’ll reply to the specifics of your reply later.
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