According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

This paper considers contractarianism as a method of justification. The analysis accepts the key tenets of contractarianism: expected utility maximization, unanimity as the criteria of acceptance, and social-scientific uncertainty of modelled agents. In addition to these three features, however, the analysis introduces a fourth feature: a criteria of rational belief formation, viz. Bayesian belief updating. Using a formal model, this paper identifies a decisive objection to contractarian justification. Insofar as contractarian projects approximate the Agreement Model, therefore, they fail to justify (...) their conclusions. Insofar as they fail to approximate the Agreement Model, they must explain which modelling assumption they reject. (shrink)

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of (...) truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus. (shrink)

Game theory has proven useful in clarifying Hobbes’s argument that the state of nature will inevitably devolve into a state of war. Mathematically-leaning philosophers, however, have paid little attention to Rousseau’s depiction of the state of nature as a peaceful, asocial state of solitary wanderers. This paper articulates Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes in formal terms, which pinpoints two crucial issues in Hobbes’s account: the lack of an exit option and an unrealistic depiction of human nature. Building upon recent game-theoretic treatments (...) of Hobbes, we first construct a model that incorporates Rousseau’s criticisms by permitting an exit option and endogenizing human preferences and capacities. Second, we draw out the implications of Rousseau’s analysis for the question of political authority, which cannot be answered, as Hobbes believed, by invoking a hypothetical state of nature. (shrink)

Several political philosophers have recently pointed out that current electoral democracies fail to facilitate accurate and reliable feedback on the performance of public officials. Rather than rejecting democracy as a hopeless ideal, we defend an institutional reform called Service Responsibility, which introduces a superior incentive structure that better aligns the interests of citizens and public officials. Service Responsibility requires increasing or decreasing the income of public officials insofar as they succeed or fail to achieve democratically chosen goals. Later, we consider (...) an alternative institutional scheme, recently proposed by Claudio López-Guerra: Piloting Responsibility. According to this alternative proposal, public officials must utilize a public provider whenever they seek out a basic service. We show that Piloting Responsibility fails to realize the democratic ideal because it generates a perverse incentive structure for public officials. We conclude that Service Responsibility outperforms both the status quo and Piloting Responsibility as an institutional scheme for ensuring competent governance and public justification. (shrink)

In an influential article, Brian Kogelmann argues that a polycentric political order offers an appealing way of reconciling deep diversity with Rawls’ ideal of the well-ordered society. Although I agree with this conclusion, I suggest an amendment to Kogelmann's argument. In particular, his argument abandons the deep diversity that originally motivates the project by stipulating that all citizens will accept liberal political conceptions of justice. I offer an alternative defence of polycentrism, one that shows its ability to achieve the goals (...) of the well-ordered society without assuming that all citizens endorse a liberal political conception. (shrink)