Sometimes dictators are benevolent. Sometimes masters are kind and gentle to their slaves. John Adams was a pretty good "husband" to Abigail Adams. But it seems like there’s something very wrong with being a dictator or a master or a spouse with the power that John Adams had over Abigail Adams in late 18th Century America. A theory of domination tries to pinpoint what’s distinctive about dictatorship and mastery and traditional husbanding, and what is distinctively wrong with such—even the benevolent, (...) kind, gentle, and pretty good varieties. -/- There has been a lot of thinking about domination over the last twenty-five or so years. This is due largely to the efforts of republican political philosophers, who have used domination and its absence — nondomination — as the primary moving part in their conceptions of freedom. Even so, perhaps because domination has often appeared in a supporting role for the analysis of other concepts, conceptualizing domination itself is still a fairly nascent endeavor. -/- Accounts of domination need at least two movements. First, domination is a subset of a social phenomenon with—at least more or less—unobjectionable varieties. Maybe this social phenomenon is power; maybe it’s the capacity to interfere with choice; maybe something else. Whatever it is, it’s plausible to think it’s not always bad. Sometimes it’s perfectly alright to have power over someone else; sometimes there’s nothing wrong with the capacity to interfere with someone’s choices. (For example, if what you’d rather do is go after your neighbor with a meat-axe, it’s a good thing if someone is in a position to interfere with you, or if your choice situation can be worsened, so that charging next door, axe in hand, without having to worry about a lengthy prison sentence is not among your options.) The first task of a theory of domination is to specify exactly what this broader social phenomenon is. -/- Next we need to figure out what gives domination its negative moral valence, and thus sets it apart from that broader social phenomenon. Republicans usually say that what makes domination morally problematic is its arbitrariness. Frank Lovett claims that domination is instantiated in a social relationship between A and B only if A is permitted to exercise power over B arbitrarily (2010, 120). Philip Pettit, until recently, claimed that domination is a capacity for arbitrary interference. Marilyn Friedman calls it “arbitrary interference in someone’s choices…”(2008, 265). If that’s right, and arbitrariness is the difference maker between forms of social power that aren’t domination and those that are, we need a story about what arbitrariness is. -/- Such are the two essential tasks of conceptualizing domination. I offer here what I think are important course-corrections for recent attempts to complete them. In §1 I set out some desiderata for a useful conception of domination before sketching the elements of earlier attempts I think we can’t do without. §2 addresses the problem of “cheap domination”. This is the problem of identifying ordinary, innocuous human interactions with anything we call domination. I don’t think we should do this, but some of the most influential accounts of domination on offer nowadays — in particular, Lovett’s and Pettit’s — have this result. Instead, I contend that only certain forms of social power can underwrite domination, and try to provide a principled way of identifying what these forms are like. Finally, in §3, I address the nature of arbitrariness. (shrink)

Theories of domination are primarily attempts to understand the value of justice, freedom, and equality by examining cases where they are absent. Such theories seek to clarify and systematize our judgments about what it is to be weak against uncontrolled strength, i.e., about what it is to be vulnerable, degraded, and defenseless against unrestrained power. -/- Much contemporary disagreement about domination involves competing answers to three questions: (1) Who, or what, can dominate? (2) Is it possible to dominate merely by (...) having power with a certain structure, or is domination an exercise or an abuse of power? (3) Exercised or unexercised, what kind of power is domination? The remainder of this entry will address each of these questions in turn, then conclude with a survey of how the idea of domination has been used in recent applied ethical theory. It will become clear as we examine competing answers to these three questions that different theorists have very different ideas of why, exactly, we need a theory of domination. There may be wide agreement that we need the idea of domination to make sense of unjust power relations, but unjust power relations are wildly varied, and theorists of domination disagree not only about which varieties most need to be understood, but about how theorizing domination helps us to understand them. (shrink)

Lots of folks nowadays think there is an intimate connection between what we assert and what we know. Talk of this connection is largely oriented around Timothy Williamson’s claim that you shouldn’t assert p unless you know p. Hereafter, I will treat this claim as follows: -/- (KNA) Don’t assert that p unless so asserting expresses your knowledge that p. -/- (KNA) is for “Knowledge Norm of Assertion”. -/- A primary aim here is to defend the KNA. However, getting in (...) the best position to do so requires attention to an older strain in the discussion of how knowledge and assertion are interrelated. This older strain is oriented less around explicit norms of assertion, and more around what assertion does. Said G.E. Moore, “by asserting p positively you imply, though you don’t assert, that you know that p” (1962: 277). Peter Unger put it this way: “If someone asserts, states, or declares that something is so, then it follows that he represents himself as knowing that it is so” (1975: 253). I will abbreviate this claim as -/- (ARK) Asserting that p represents the speaker as knowing that p. -/- (ARK) for “Assertion Represents Knowledge”. -/- The central contention of this paper is this: if ARK is true, we should accept the KNA too. S shouldn’t assert that p unless p expresses S’s knowledge because, given ARK, when S asserts that p, S gives her interlocutors entitlement to infer that S knows that p. An assertion that p that does not express knowledge that p is thus defective, however blameless or praiseworthy it may be for other reasons. (As we’ll see, you can accomplish noble, worthy things through infelicitous assertions.) The argument will proceed as follows. §1 musters some of the best evidence for thinking that ARK is true. Some of this evidence is re-appropriated from arguments for the KNA; yet more is extracted from proposed counterexamples to the KNA that (plausibly) apply ARK. §2 builds on Ishani Maitra’s (2011) treatment of constitutive rules to make the case for treating ARK, rather than the KNA, as the constitutive rule of assertion. §3 builds on the results of the previous sections to show the advantages of a KNA grounded in ARK. (shrink)

There is a kind of power no one should have over anyone else, even if they don’t do anything with this power, or even if they only use this power for good. The republican tradition of political philosophy calls this kind of power domination. Here, I develop a theory of domination, and use this theory to advance our understanding of political legitimacy and justification. My account of domination refines recent neo-republican attempts to identify dominating social power with the capacity to (...) interfere arbitrarily with the choices of others. I argue that this capacity is not sufficient for domination. Instead, domination requires that one agent possess “impositional” power over someone else: power enough to make their refusal to cooperate more costly than cooperation across a wide range of forms that cooperation might take. But not all impositional power is domination; impositional power is domination to the extent that those wielding it do so in “deliberative isolation”—in accord only with their own sense of what’s best. The nature of domination, what it takes to minimize it, and its connection to deficits in political values like freedom and equality, are the subject of Chapter 2. The remainder of the dissertation uses the results of that chapter to construct a non-voluntarist alternative to the standard liberal account of how to reconcile political power with freedom and equality. Chapters 3 and 4 show how consent—actual or hypothetical—is not necessary to legitimize political power. What is necessary is that such power enable us to fulfil our duties against dominating others, while remaining accountable to us so that the state does not itself become a source of domination. How duties against domination can legitimize states is the primary subject of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 turns to the question of what we owe our fellow citizens as we cooperate together in the task of holding the state accountable. The answer to this question amounts to a repurposing and reformulation of public reason liberalism. Adviser: Joseph Mendola. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron This is a poorly organized book, and it does not really present any well- structured arguments. In a blurb on the back of the book, Christopher Eisgruber says that “every serious scholar of religious toleration will have to contend with Leiter’s bold claims.” That would have been so if Leiter had proceeded less precipitously to the question that interests him and then focused on it more steadily— if, for example, he had first identified the classic arguments for toleration (...) and criticized them and had then gone on to argue that neither the classic tolerationist arguments ðsuch as they areÞ nor any other principled arguments can make a case for religious accommodations. That would have been a bold and bracing argument. But poor structure and lack of clarity with definitions make it harder to see what is at stake in any of the arguments and what position exactly Leiter is counseling us to take. Christopher McCammon There’s been enough renewed interest in republicanism over the past thirty years that we can call it a “republican revival.” If you know about this revival, it’s probably through the Quentin Skinner cum Philip Pettit excavation of a third way between Isaiah Berlin’s conceptions of negative and positive freedom. For republicans, Skinner and Pettit tell us, freedom is ðor at least requiresÞ nondomination. Living without domination requires neither the absence of interference nor the actualization of ideals associated with positive liberty—autonomy, self-mastery, and so on. Suppose I want to drink less, but I just can’t sober up. So I hand over my liquor cabinet’s key to a friend, on the understanding that she will only return it after a day’s notice. This is one of Pettit’s favorite examples. He thinks it shows how interference doesn’t always compromise freedom. If I beg you for the immediate return of my key, and you refuse as per my instructions, you interfere with me, but you don’t reduce my freedom because you interfere on my terms. Interference makes me less free only when it isn’t on my terms—such interference is “arbitrary”as republicans often say. Arbitrary interference always reduces freedom. Suppose you stole the key in hopes of helping me overcome alcoholism. Your actions might lead to increased self-mastery, but you left me worse off in a freedom-specific way nonetheless. Pettit thinks that a robust commitment to democracy falls right out of this conception of freedom. The republican tradition rejects outright William Paley’s claim that life under “the edicts of a despotic prince” might be “no less free than the purest democracy” ðThe Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002], 314Þ. Why? Because however religiously they leave us alone, despotic princes hold a power of arbitrary interference. The promise of democracy, from a republican perspective like Pettit’s, is that a democratic regime is one where the state interferes only as bidden by the people. He claims that there is thus a deep, maybe even conceptual, connection between republicanism and democracy. (shrink)