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)

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)

Aristotle argues that the world is populated by real and distinct physical substances; Spinoza that there must and can only be one physical substance. Aristotle’s view carries considerably intuitive appeal, but Spinoza’s logic can, under the right interpretation, seem awfully convincing. Andrew Burnside (2023) helps us to explore what occurs when Aristotle’s unstoppable intuitive appeal meets Spinoza’s impeccable logic. Burnside’s project, as I understand it, has two aims: to show that Spinoza’s argument for one extended substance is a better account (...) of physical reality than Aristotle’s arguments against an infinite body and, second, to support this claim by defending Yitzhak Melamed interpretation of Spinoza as genuinely dividing reality into substances and modes. I would like to press Burnside on the usefulness of comparing Aristotle and Spinoza with respect to an infinitely extended physical thing and then raise several question for his reading of Spinoza. (shrink)

Algorithmic decision-making increasingly shapes people's daily lives. Given that such autonomous systems can cause severe harm to individuals and social groups, fairness concerns have arisen. A human-centric approach demanded by scholars and policymakers requires considering people's fairness perceptions when designing and implementing algorithmic decision-making. We provide a comprehensive, systematic literature review synthesizing the existing empirical insights on perceptions of algorithmic fairness from 58 empirical studies spanning multiple domains and scientific disciplines. Through thorough coding, we systemize the current empirical literature (...) along four dimensions: (1) algorithmic predictors, (2) human predictors, (3) comparative effects (human decision-making vs. algorithmic decision-making), and (4) consequences of algorithmic decision-making. While we identify much heterogeneity around the theoretical concepts and empirical measurements of algorithmic fairness, the insights come almost exclusively from Western-democratic contexts. By advocating for more interdisciplinary research adopting a society-in-the-loop framework, we hope our work will contribute to fairer and more responsible algorithmic decision-making. (shrink)

Theorists of public reason such as John Rawls often idealize constitutional courts as exemplars of public reason. This paper raises questions about the seduction and limits of analogies between theorists’ account of public reason and actual constitutional jurisprudence. Examining the work product of the United States Supreme Court, the paper argues that while it does engage in reason-giving to support its decisions—as the public reason strategy suggests— those reasons are (largely) legalistic and specifically juristic reasons—not the theorists’ idealized moral-political reasons (...) on matters of fundamental principle. But if constitutional courts do not engage on matters of fundamental principle, then a public reason strategy for assuaging democratic worries about judicial review would no longer be open: prominent liberal and deliberative democratic theorists could no longer point to the alleged superiority of constitutional courts to speak in the name of, and for, the people’s shared political principles. The paper extends beyond the U.S. case study by pointing to three institutional factors explaining the disanalogy between what some constitutional courts do and what public reason theories require them to do. It concludes with considerations about whether the public reason strategy might be more successfully applied to international courts. (shrink)

Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammer of Social Conflicts (reviewed by Christopher Zurn).

Review of Greek Philosophy in the New Millenium, edited by Livio Rossetti.

Review of Desire, Identity and Existence, edited by Naomi Reshotko.

Review of Ancient Concepts of Philosophy by William Jordan.

Review of Monte Johnson, Aristotle on Telelogy.