The “relational turn” in social research raises many issues that might loosely be collected together under the heading of “reflexivity.” This can have a variety of meanings, but here, follo...

A leading scholar in the psychology of thinking and reasoning argues that the counterfactual imagination—the creation of "if only" alternatives to ...

Questioning the usual judgements of political ethics, Ruth W. Grant argues that hypocrisy can actually be constructive while strictly principled behavior can be destructive. _Hypocrisy and Integrity_ offers a new conceptual framework that clarifies the differences between idealism and fanaticism while it uncovers the moral limits of compromise. "Exciting and provocative.... Grant's work is to be highly recommended, offering a fresh reading of Rousseau and Machiavelli as well as presenting a penetrating analysis of hypocrisy and integrity."—Ronald J. Terchek, _American (...) Political Science Review_ "A great refreshment.... With liberalism's best interests at heart, Grant seeks to make available a better understanding of the limits of reason in politics."—Peter Berkowitz, _New Republic_. (shrink)

There is no grander topic for us today, and Wolin's treatment is penetrating, thorough, and authoritative. This is a major work of political theory.

When an activity is unwanted, administrators often adopt a zero tolerance policy towards that activity. The background assumption is that, by adopting a zero tolerance policy, one is doing everything that one can to reduce or eliminate the activity in question. Yet which policy best serves to reduce an unwanted behavior is always an empirical question. Thus, those who adopt a zero tolerance policy towards some behavior without first investigating and finding that they are in a set of circumstances where (...) that policy is the most cost-effective way of reducing or eliminating the undesirable behavior are committing the zero tolerance fallacy. (shrink)

Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

In this paper I adduce a new argument in support of the claim that IBE is an autonomous form of inference, based on a familiar, yet surprisingly, under-discussed, problem for Hume’s theory of induction. I then use some insights thereby gleaned to argue for the claim that induction is really IBE, and draw some normative conclusions.

I defend the suggestion that the rational probability in the Sleeping Beauty paradox is one third. The reasoning in its favour is familiar: for every heads-waking, there are two tails-wakings. To complete the defense, I rebut the reasoning which purports to justify the competing suggestion – that the correct probability is half – by undermining its premise, that no new information has been received.

It is possible that a fair coin tossed infinitely many times will always land heads. So the probability of such a sequence of outcomes should, intuitively, be positive, albeit miniscule: 0 probability ought to be reserved for impossible events. And, furthermore, since the tosses are independent and the probability of heads (and tails) on a single toss is half, all sequences are equiprobable. But Williamson has adduced an argument that purports to show that our intuitions notwithstanding, the probability of an (...) infinite sequence is 0. In this paper, I rebut his argument.No Abstract. (shrink)

The zero tolerance fallacy occurs when someone advocates or adopts a zero tolerance policy towards some activity or behaviour without seeing if there is evidence to support the view that such a policy is the best or most cost-effective way of preventing or reducing the unwanted behaviour. This paper explores the idea that, instead of thinking about what the zero tolerance fallacy is, argumentation theorists should try to characterize what features good arguments for zero tolerance policies must have.

To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions. Thoreau.

Political Theory as a Vocation -- Transgression, Equality, and Voice -- Norm and Form : The Constitutionalizing of Democracy -- Fugitive Democracy -- Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory -- Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism -- On Reading Marx Politically -- Max Weber : Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory -- Reason in Exile : Critical Theory and Technological Society -- Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political -- Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time -- The (...) Liberal/Democratic Divide : On Rawls's Political Liberalism -- On the Theory and Practice of Power -- Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism -- Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth -- The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism -- From Progress to Modernization : The Conservative Turn -- Editorial -- What Revolutionary Action Means Today -- The People's Two Bodies -- The New Public Philosophy -- Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition -- Constitutional Order, Revolutionary Violence and Modern Power -- Agitated Times. (shrink)

Ninety-five freshmen each recruited three peers to play a "group bidding game," an N-person prisoner’s dilemma in which anyone could win movie tickets depending on their scores in the game. Prior to playing, all participants completed a measure of prosocial value orientation. Replicating and extending earlier findings (Sheldon and McGregor 2000), our results show that prosocial participants were at a disadvantage within groups. Despite this vulnerability, prosocial participants did no worse overall than asocial participants because a counteracting group-level advantage (...) arose for prosocials, who tended to be concentrated in groups. Implications of this assortative process for the egoism/altruism debate, and for hierarchical selection theory, are discussed. (shrink)

When I started doing clinical ethics rounds, in the mid 1980s, I decided to venture onto the pediatrics ward. The first patient I encountered was a 3-year-old girl returning to her room, groggy from general anesthesia. When I inquired about her, the nurse explained that she had just gone through the procedure to donate bone marrow for her 1-year-old sister, who was preparing to undergo bone marrow transplantation for leukemia.

The Moral Limits of Law analyzes the related debates concerning the moral obligation to obey the law, conscientious citizenship, and state legitimacy. Modern societies are drawn in a tension between the centripetal pull of the local and the centrifugal stress of the global. Boundaries that once appeared permanent are now permeable: transnational legal, economic, and trade institutions increasingly erode the autonomy of states. Nonetheless transnational principles are still typically effected through state law. For law's subjects, this tension brings into focus (...) the interaction of legal and moral obligations and the legitimacy of state authority. This volume incorporates a comprehensive critical analysis of the methodology and substance of the debates in recent legal, political, and moral philosophy, regarding political obligation and the moral obligation to obey the law. The author argues that traditional accounts of political obligation that assume a bounded conception of the polity are no longer tenable. Higgins therefore presents an original theory of the conscientious agent's attitude towards law that accommodates the contemporary social tension between local and global obligations. (shrink)

Many of the problems we face can usefully be modeled as prisoners’ dilemmas. All the standard game-theoretic solutions to prisoners’ dilemmas lead, in the real world, to assurance games. But too often some aspects of our social interaction are as much obscured by, as illuminated by, game theory. Removing some of the epistemic constraints often accepted by game theorists will enable us to distinguish between productive and destructive prisoners’ dilemmas. Doing so is an important step in understanding the nature of (...) some of our social problems. (shrink)

Incentives are typically conceived as a form of trade, and so voluntariness appears to be the only ethical concern. As a consequence, incentives are often considered ethically superior to regulations because they are voluntary rather than coercive. But incentives can also be viewed as one way to get others to do what they otherwise would not; that is, as a form of power. When incentives are viewed in this light, many ethical questions arise in addition to voluntariness: What are the (...) responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? Like all other forms of power, incentives can be abused. This paper develops criteria for distinguishing their legitimate from their illegitimate uses, viz. legitimacy of purpose, voluntariness, and effect on character. The criteria are then applied to three cases: plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, and motivating children to learn. Thinking of incentives in terms of.. (shrink)

Consider the following problem. A multinational corporation is expanding its operations to a developing country. The developing country in question is now a democracy or is in the process of becoming one, it has a (fairly) independent and corruption-free judiciary (or is in the process of establishing one), its human rights record, while not perfect, is improving, and its bureaucracy and police are not now terribly corrupt. But not too long ago, none of these things were true. A few years (...) back, the nation was run by a dictator, and the bureaucracy, judiciary, and police were all corrupt. Business people, and everyone else, had to operate within this corrupt system, and for business people this usually involved—at a minimum—lending tacit support to the existing regime, paying bribes, making financial “donations” to the ruling party, overlooking various “activities”, and so forth. (shrink)

Grant that Hume is a contractarian. Justice then arises from more basic features of humans and their circumstances. Among these more basic features from which justice arises Hume includes (in addition to self-interest narrowly construed) the widely held passions of benevolence and sympathy. But it is mysterious why he included them in his contractarian theory for the derivation of justice does not need them, and may even be weaker with them included. This paper suggests that Hume’s philosophy of mind, in (...) particular his account of the imagination, forced him to include benevolence and sympathy along with self-interest as the passions on which justice is based. (shrink)

Grant that Hume is a contractarian. Justice then arises from more basic features of humans and their circumstances. Among these more basic features from which justice arises Hume includes (in addition to self-interest narrowly construed) the widely held passions of benevolence and sympathy. But it is mysterious why he included them in his contractarian theory for the derivation of justice does not need them, and may even be weaker with them included. This paper suggests that Hume’s philosophy of mind, in (...) particular his account of the imagination, forced him to include benevolence and sympathy along with self-interest as the passions on which justice is based. (shrink)

This paper suggests a way of thinking about the legal reasoning done by conscientious judges working in a legal system during periods when those judges believed that their Supreme Court was malfunctioning. Seeing a legal system as a shared cooperative activity allows us to best understand how legal decision-making can remain consistent when it contains elements at the highest level which are believed not to be functioning properly.

This paper surveys the various leading options as a metric for measuring the level of development in a society. It is then argued that the appropriate metric will be value-laden in a (fairly) rich sense. One metric is then shown to have substantial advantages in this regard.