Announcing a virtual reading group on Greek philosophy that Cory Massimino and I will be starting up later this month:
For more details, and an application form, see:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RcOJ5pkvsOaKQKQ1e36F75T8_XinSGLr-zM824pK4OM/viewform?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3Vp6gGE9ikCUK9D4cpfq3fl6CvPaUdnyJZW6R_7YbuaPCRzKuhLa8tK7U_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw&edit_requested=true
How much of republicanism can we get without making any essential reference to domination? Maybe quite a lot.
First, whatever job the government has, if carrying out this job requires substantial power that is liable to abuse, then part of your political ideal should be republican democracy (and you should be very leery of even putatively ideally benevolent dictators). In particular, you might want a high level of assurance, born in part through moral recognition, that the government or government officials will not behave like the criminals that they are supposed to protect us against (supposing that this, at least, is part of the job that governments have). Just say no to a charter city run by Elon Musk or whatever.
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.)
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).
I was once parodied on a YouTube video (by whom I don’t recall) as holding that “people who are right and people who are wrong are basically saying the same thing.” While I obviously wouldn’t endorse the claim in the form stated, the line does insightfully capture something about my approach – a suspicion of stark oppositions. Suspicion, not invariable rejection: sometimes one side of an opposition is just completely and uninterestingly wrong. But I’m regularly finding my way to angles from which supposedly stark oppositions can be seen as complicated or subverted by unexpected affinities – which is why, e.g., I was never fully satisfied, even at the height of my Randian period, with the cops-and-robbers approach to intellectual history that prevails in Randian (and not only Randian) circles, consigning all of e.g. Plato’s or Augustine’s or Hume’s or Kant’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Heidegger’s or Rawls’s writings to the Dustbin of Total and Irredeemable Worthlessness, rather than approaching them with the expectation that they might have something valuable to teach.
Hence my tendency to question such oppositions as libertarianism versus social justice, analytic versus continental, social anarchism versus anarcho-capitalism, deontology versus teleology, eastern versus western thought, theism versus atheism, Hayekianism versus Rothbardianism, and most recently, Randian discipline versus Kerouacian spontaneity. (And no, it’s not a rejection of the law of non-contradiction to question whether positions presented as mutually contradictory really are so.)
One of the most important pieces of advice I would give to young scholars beginning their intellectual journeys is not to structure their conceptual landscape so as to close themselves off from the opportunity to learn from both sides of supposedly unbridgeable gaps.
Is a kind of value associated specifically with there being reason (not shared with others) for one to desire/value and promote/secure one’s well-being (or particular elements of it)? If so, how should we characterize it?
One natural suggestion is this: X’s well-being is valuable to X. The value here would be agent-relative, as distinct from value simpliciter (or agent-neutral value).
Against this suggestion, it is pointed out that the value language we generally use here is the language of good-for. For example, there is reason (not shared by others) for X to secure that-P because that-P is good for X. And we don’t generally use the language of valuable-to or valuable-relative-to. Of course, this does not preclude the concept (and property) of agent-relative value being required for philosophical theory, for descriptive and explanatory virtue or adequacy. The point, I think, is meant to set up a kind of burden of proof.
Pleasure itself is good. In particular, (a) if X has a pleasant or enjoyable experience, this is inherently good for X in that it is part of (not just something that promotes) X’s well-being and (b) X’s pleasant or enjoyable experience is inherently or non-instrumentally good or valuable to X (the experience is non-instrumentally agent-relatively valuable). Though we do not typically make the distinction between [a] and [b] clear, it can be teased out from a competent language-user.
Continue readingIf I say that a state of affairs, S, is good (good simpliciter or agent-neutrally valuable or good), I usually mean something like this: S is better than some implied comparison class of other states of affairs. And so, in this usage, ‘good’ is like ‘tall’: it is a disguised comparative feature, not a non-comparative feature. This kind of value, then, is properly analyzed in terms of better-than. It is for this kind of reason that many theorists take value simpliciter (or other sorts of value or all sorts of value) to be properly analyzed in terms of better-than. Here’s why that seems wrong to me.
According to my suggested analysis of O[that P] – see my immediately previous post, “Person-Directed Anger…” – it is appropriate for one to have negative, person-directed attitudes toward a person (i) failing to have positive attitudes toward that-P obtaining (or failing to have negative attitudes toward P not obtaining).
If person A puts in a good, smart effort in attempting some task, we think something like this: it “should be the case” that she succeeds. Similarly, if B works harder and smarter than A at the same type of task, then it “should be the case” that B’s efforts yield more success than A’s efforts. (In this case, we might also think that it is fair that B have more success than A – and that it would be unfair if it went the other way around.)
What is ‘should be the case’ getting at in these cases? We might analyze the feature here in terms of appropriate response in attitude.
Policy of Truth 