There is an unusual region in Singapore called Hougang, whose residents have collectively rejected lavish, State-funded, urban renewal offers. As they have been doing so for more than two decades, Hougang stands out for its aged flats and amenities in one of the richest countries in the world. This curious situation arose from the Singapore Government's stance that urban renewal of electoral constituencies should depend on political affiliation. This essay looks at the ethics of the situation.

Proponents of the duty to vote (DTV) argue that in normal circumstances, citizens have the moral duty to vote in political elections. Discussions about DTV analyze _what_ the duty is, _who_ has this duty, _when_ they have it, and _why_ they have it. Missing are answers to the Specification Question: to _which_ elections does DTV apply? A dilemma arises for some supporters of DTV—in this paper, I focus on Julia Maskivker’s work—because either answer is problematic. First, I argue that it (...) is implausible that DTV applies to _all_ elections because this makes the duty too costly for the voter. Second, I argue that there are no good reasons why under normal circumstances DTV applies only to _some_ elections. I consider objections but conclude that the dilemma is successful and therefore the case for DTV is incomplete. (shrink)

Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided (...) by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 122-164, May 2022. I argue that the consensus view that one must never level down to equality gives rise to a dilemma. This dilemma is best understood by examining two parallel cases of leveling down: one drawn from the economic domain, the other from the political. In the economic case, both egalitarians and non-egalitarians have resisted the idea of leveling down wages to equality. With no incentives for some people to work (...) hard social productivity will likely decline, further lowering people's wages and thus leaving everybody all-things-considered worse off as a result—hence “never level down.” On the other hand, however, the argument against leveling down does not appear to pass muster in the political sphere: denying political equality in the form of “one person, one vote”, for example, by giving a higher share of voting power to people with, say, more education seems straightforwardly objectionable, even if such a voting scheme would improve the outcomes of all people, including those who are ultimately left with fewer votes. Thus, a fundamental tension arises: we can either endorse the widely-affirmed “never-level-down” thesis, which says that sacrificing people's well-being exclusively for the sake of promoting equality can never be the right thing to do, or we can endorse the principle of “one person, one vote.” But we cannot do both. I defend this dilemma against a view I call the compatibility view: roughly, that because OPOV is strictly necessary to advance some weighty, non-egalitarian interest people have, accepting OPOV as a principle of justice is compatible with one's rejection of leveling down. (shrink)

In 1946, the French constitution made colonial subjects in Africa into citizens. Having been content to rule ‘tribes’ via their ‘chiefs’, at that point it had to track individuals entitled to vote and receive social benefits. The new citizens retained their personal status — regulating marriage, filiation, and inheritance — under Islamic law or local ‘customs’ rather than through the civil code. That posed a dilemma for French officials, for the état-civil did not just record life events, but symbolized the (...) integration of all into a single body of citizens. French officials and legislators — including African representatives — could not agree on whether the multiple status regimes necessitated two états-civils or one. In the end, officials were too torn between their recognition of difference among peoples under French rule and their desire for singularity to put in place a consistent policy of identification, registration, and surveillance. They bequeathed the problem to their successors. (shrink)

''In a democracy, should everyone - absolutely everyone - get a vote? Does it really matter if tigers become extinct? Why does murder carry a heavier penalty than attempted murder? If you don't like the socks your grandma gives you for Christmas, should you tell her so? This entertaining introduction to ethics will bring you face to face with some tough moral choices. It presents you with 101 imaginative scenarios - sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic and sometimes uncomfortably realistic - which (...) will force you to re-examine your most cherished assumptions about right and wrong. Including: the torturer with a conscience; the lady who can prevent enormous suffering for the price of a latte; and the man who is handy with his fists but not a killer, surely." -- Back cover. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the widespread practice in the United States of busing voters to the polling station on Election Day is an instance of paying people to vote. We defend a definition of what it means to pay people to vote, and on this definition, busing voters to the polling station is an instance of paying people to vote. Paying people to vote is illegal according to United States federal election law. However, the United States courts have (...) historically considered the practice of busing voters to the polling station legally permissible. The United States legal system, therefore, faces a dilemma: either the courts must change their interpretation of current federal election law such that busing voters to the polling station is a violation of federal election law, or federal election law must be changed so that at least some instances of paying people to vote are legally permissible. We argue that choosing either horn of the dilemma has a controversial implication for the United States legal system. (shrink)

The widely discussed "discursive dilemma" shows that majority voting in a group of individuals on logically connected propositions may produce irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of individuals accepting it exceeds a given threshold, where different thresholds may be used for different propositions. After characterizing quota rules, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions on the required thresholds for various collective rationality requirements. We also (...) consider sequential quota rules, which ensure collective rationality by adjudicating propositions sequentially and letting earlier judgments constrain later ones. Sequential rules may be path-dependent and strategically manipulable. We characterize path-independence and prove its essential equivalence to strategy-proofness. Our results shed light on the rationality of simple-, super-, and sub-majoritarian decision-making. (shrink)

Political egalitarianism is at the core of most normative conceptions of democratic legitimacy. It finds its minimal expression in the “one person one vote” formula. In the literature on deliberative democracy, political equality is typically interpreted in a more demanding sense, but different interpretations of what political equality requires can be identified. In this paper I shall argue that the attempt to specify political equality in deliberative democracy is affected by a dilemma. I shall illustrate the political egalitarian’s dilemma by (...) a hypothetical choice between two informational bases for political equality: Rawlsian primary goods and Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The political egalitarian’s dilemma reveals a clash between the requirement of ensuring equal possibilities to participate in the democratic process and the requirement of subjecting substantive judgments to deliberative evaluation. As such, the dilemma is a variant of the procedure vs. substance dilemma that is well-known in democratic theory. While it has sometimes been argued that deliberative democracy solves the tension between procedure and substance, the political egalitarian’s dilemma shows that this tension continues within deliberative democracy. (shrink)

List and Pettit have stated an impossibility theorem about the aggregation of individual opinion states. Building on recent work on the lottery paradox, this paper offers a variation on that result. The present result places different constraints on the voting agenda and the domain of profiles, but it covers a larger class of voting rules, which need not satisfy the proposition-wise independence of votes.

The Tragedy of the Commons is often associated with an n-person Prisoner’s Dilemma. But it can also have the structure of an n-person Game of Chicken, an Assurance Game, or of a Voting Games (or a Three-in-a-Boat Game). I present three historical stories that document tragedies of the commons, as presented in Aristotle, Mahanarayan and Hume and argue that the descriptions of these historical cases align better with Voting Games than with any other games.

Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually vote, in the light of that debate, on whether or not to support the conclusion? Or does it recommend (...) that members individually vote on the premises, and then let their commitment to the conclusion be settled by whether or not the group endorses the required premises? Deliberative-democratic theory has not addressed this issue, and this is a problem. The discursive dilemma of my title--a generalisation of the doctrinal paradox from analytical jurisprudence--shows that the procedures distinguished can come apart. Thus deliberative democrats must make up their minds on where they stand in relation to the issue; they cannot sit on the fence. This paper is an attempt to address the issue and look at the grounds on which it may be resolved. (shrink)

Pluralism, or the existence of independent organizations, is desirable, and unavoidable in a large scale democracy. Such organizations are also potentially harmful, and require control. How much autonomy should they have, and how much should they be controlled? This is the basic dilemma of pluralist democracy, and Robert Dahl examines the major alternative solutions. He argues for a decentralized democratic socialism. He also makes clear how such a society would face many of the dilemmas of pluralist democracy, such as (...) rights to organizational autonomy vs. social utility, equality in voting for individuals vs. equality for organizations, and others. (shrink)

Pluralism, or the existence of independent organizations, is desirable, and unavoidable in a large scale democracy. Such organizations are also potentially harmful, and require control. How much autonomy should they have, and how much should they be controlled? This is the basic dilemma of pluralist democracy, and Robert Dahl examines the major alternative solutions. He argues for a decentralized democratic socialism. He also makes clear how such a society would face many of the dilemmas of pluralist democracy, such as (...) rights to organizational autonomy vs. social utility, equality in voting for individuals vs. equality for organizations, and others. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of (...) propositions (the conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions. (shrink)

There is some cost to you in voting. While it may be small for some, it is significant for others. Some people go to a great deal of effort just to vote. What return do they get for this effort? Zilch! A single vote can only impact an election when there is a tie, which has essentially zero chance of happening in a state or national election. The typical response to this is "Well, what if everyone did that?" Of (...) course, that would be a disaster. But we are not talking about everyone, we are talking about ONE individual. (shrink)

Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually vote, in the light of that debate, on whether or not to support the conclusion? Or does it recommend (...) that members individually vote on the premises, and then let their commitment to the conclusion be settled by whether or not the group endorses the required premises? Is deliberative democracy to enforce the discipline of reason at the individual level, as in the first possibility, or at the collective level, as in the second? (shrink)

The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule produces actual or apparent dilemmas for voters in ways that (...) are morally objectionable, and avoidable under preferential voting systems. This expressive case against plurality rule is both simpler and more ecumenical than its consequentialist counterpart, and it provides strong reasons to prefer alternatives to plurality rule. Moreover, it suggests a distinct way of evaluating different alternatives like preferential voting. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on those propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. The literature on judgment aggregation refers to that problem as the discursive dilemma. In this paper, we motivate that many groups do not only want to reach a factually right conclusion, but also want to correctly evaluate the reasons for that conclusion. (...) In other words, we address the problem of tracking the true situation instead of merely selecting the right outcome. We set up a probabilistic model analogous to Bovens and Rabinowicz (2006) and compare several aggregation procedures by means of theoretical results, numerical simulations and practical considerations. Among them are the premise-based, the situation-based and the distance-based procedure. Our findings confirm the conjecture in Hartmann, Pigozzi and Sprenger (2008) that the premise-based procedure is a crude, but reliable and sometimes even optimal form of judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Which rules for aggregating judgments on logically connected propositions are manipulable and which not? In this paper, we introduce a preference-free concept of non-manipulability and contrast it with a preference-theoretic concept of strategy-proofness. We characterize all non-manipulable and all strategy-proof judgment aggregation rules and prove an impossibility theorem similar to the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem. We also discuss weaker forms of non-manipulability and strategy-proofness. Comparing two frequently discussed aggregation rules, we show that “conclusion-based voting” is less vulnerable to manipulation than “premise-based (...) voting”, which is strategy-proof only for “reason-oriented” individuals. Surprisingly, for “outcome-oriented” individuals, the two rules are strategically equivalent, generating identical judgments in equilibrium. Our results introduce game-theoretic considerations into judgment aggregation and have implications for debates on deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided (...) by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided (...) by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

Many groups make decisions over multiple interconnected propositions. The “doctrinal paradox” or “discursive dilemma” shows that propositionwise majority voting can generate inconsistent collective sets of judgments, even when individual sets of judgments are all consistent. I develop a simple model for determining the probability of the paradox, given various assumptions about the probability distribution of individual sets of judgments, including impartial culture and impartial anonymous culture assumptions. I prove several convergence results, identifying when the probability of the paradox converges (...) to 1, and when it converges to 0, as the number of individuals increases. Drawing on the Condorcet jury theorem and work by Bovens and Rabinowicz , I use the model to assess the “truth-tracking” performance of two decision procedures, the premise- and conclusion-based procedures. I compare the present results with existing results on the probability of Condorcet’s paradox. I suggest that the doctrinal paradox is likely to occur under plausible conditions. (shrink)

There are two seemingly unrelated paradoxes of democracy. The older one is the doctrinal paradox or the discursive dilemma. or a comprehensive bibliography, see List 1995. The younger one is the mixed motivation problem introduced by Jonathan Wolff (1994) in this journal. In the mixed motivation problem, we have voters with mixed Benthamite and Rousseauian motivations who reach a majority on an issue that is neither in the self-interest of a majority of the voters, nor considered to be conducive to (...) the common good by a majority of the voters. What has gone unnoticed so far is that both of these paradoxes share a common structure. (shrink)

This review of Richard Tuck's Free Riding conveys Tuck's crucial distinction between the logic of collective action which fails due to the problem of causal negligibility, and free riding, which has been modeled as a Prisoner's Dilemma and involves casually impacting another actor in an adverse manner. Tuck also distinguishes the practice of voting which he argues neither fails due to the worry of causal negligibility or due to free riding; instead it represents a problem of achieving sufficiency of (...) votes representing a minimum winning coalition. This article clarifies how the problem of collective action resembles perfect free market competition which is defined to be characterized by a state in which no single agent can impact the price of a good. Similarly, in a large scale collective action, no single actor can have a causal impact on the outcome of the vast enterprise. This inability to make a difference due to the negligibility of each individual's causal power differentiates collective action and the tragedy of the commons from other social problems. (shrink)

Social processes like voting procedures, debates, etc. depend crucially on the precise rules which define them. This rule sensitivity is illustrated by two examples, in the case of preference aggregation by the parliamentary debate concerning the German capital, and in the case of judgement aggregation by the doctrinal paradox or discursive dilemma. Using social choice functions and the theory of mechanism design, one can formulate what it means for a particular set of rules to be correct under a given (...) game-theoretic solution concept. Furthermore, it is argued that in particular methods from logic and computer science are useful to describe and reason about the rules of play in a precise manner. (shrink)

Suppose a committee has to take a stand on a complex issue, where the decision presupposes answering a number of sub-questions. There is an agreement within the committee which sub-questions should be posed. All questions are of the ”yes or no?”-type and the main question is to be given the yes-answer if and only if each sub-question is answered with “yes”. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one procedure, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the (...) voting results then determine the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure (or pbp, for short) can be contrasted with the conclusion-based procedure (cbp), on which the members directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The problem we want to examine concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. In some cases one can assume that the question before the committee has a right answer, which the committee is trying to reach. Is one of the two procedures better when it comes to tracking the truth? As it turns out, the answer to this query is not univocal: On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem we shall show that the premise-based procedure is clearly superior if we want to reach truth for the right reasons, i.e. without making any mistakes on the road to the conclusion. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be special cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable. But for the most part, the premise-based procedure will still retain its superiority. In this respect, our results disconfirm the tentative conjectures that have been put forward in Pettit and Rabinowicz (2001). (shrink)

Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. (...) This can happen even if various conditions are held constant, such as: the evidence jurors have access to, the voting system, the number of jurors, some independence conditions between voters, and so forth. This observation matters in many active debates on, e.g., epistemic dilemmas, the wisdom of crowds, independence theses, epistemic democracy, and the division of epistemic labour. (shrink)

The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. Although the paradox and the theorem concern the aggregation of judgments rather than preferences, they invite (...) comparison with two established results on the aggregation of preferences: the Condorcet paradox and Arrow's impossibility theorem. We may ask whether the new impossibility theorem is a special case of Arrow's theorem, or whether there are interesting disanalogies between the two results. In this paper, we compare the two theorems, and show that they are not straightforward corollaries of each other. We further suggest that, while the framework of preference aggregation can be mapped into the framework of judgment aggregation, there exists no obvious reverse mapping. Finally, we address one particular minimal condition that is used in both theorems – an independence condition – and suggest that this condition points towards a unifying property underlying both impossibility results. (shrink)

Recent findings from psychology and behavioral economics suggest that we are “predictably irrational” in the pursuit of our interests. Paternalists from both the social sciences and philosophy use these findings to defend interfering with people's consumption choices for their own good. We should tax soda, ban cigarettes, and mandate retirement savings to make people healthier and wealthier than they’d be on their own. Our thesis is that the standard arguments offered in support of restricting people’s consumption choices for their own (...) good also imply support for “epistocratic” restrictions on people’s voting choices for their own good. Indeed, the philosophical case for paternalistic restrictions on voting choices may be stronger than the case for restricting personal consumption choices. So, paternalists face a dilemma: either endorse less interference with consumption choices or more interference with voting choices. (shrink)

The standard theory of electoral accountability treats the electorate as an appraiser of government performance on a range of complex issues, which re-elects or de-elects depending on its evaluation of that performance. This paper draws from studies on voter knowledge and behaviour to present a dilemma for the standard theory: either voters do not know how well their rulers have performed, or if they do, they do not base their votes on that knowledge. It is shown that, on either horn (...) of the dilemma, the standard account of electoral accountability fails, and that attempts to deflate the dilemma through heuristic and aggregative approaches to voter knowledge, or proposals for alternative systems of government, are also inadequate. The paper then sets out and defends an alternative conception of electoral accountability, which holds that electoral accountability is not about micro-assessing a government’s actions. Rather, it is about preventing political rulers from committing or allowing substantial harms to come upon those they govern. This alternative conception is compatible with a realistic view of voter knowledge and behaviour, but nonetheless makes electoral accountability an essential component of a well-functioning democratic system. (shrink)

The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on the same propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. The literature on judgment aggregation refers to such a problem as the \textit{discursive dilemma}. In this paper we assume that the decision which the group is trying to reach is factually right or wrong. Hence, we address the question of how (...) good the various approaches are at selecting the right conclusion. We focus on two approaches: distance-based procedures and a Bayesian analysis. They correspond to group-internal and group-external decision-making, respectively. We compare those methods in a probabilistic model, demonstrate the robustness of our results over various generalizations and discuss their applicability in different situations. The findings vindicate (i) that in judgment aggregation problems, reasons should carry higher weight than conclusions and (ii) that considering members of an advisory board to be highly competent is a better strategy than to underestimate their advice.". (shrink)

Organisational Ethics could be more effectively taught if organisational agency could be better distinguished from activity in other group entities, and defended against criticisms. Some criticisms come from the side of what is called “methodological individualism”. These critics argue that, strictly speaking, only individuals really exist and act, and organisations are not individuals, real things, or agents. Other criticisms come from fear of the possible use of alleged “corporate personhood” to argue for a possible radical expansion of corporate rights e.g. (...) to claim a right to vote. Others say that if corporate businesses were persons, and judged as such, they would be sociopaths (Bakan 2004). Large corporate businesses are one kind of organisation, and if organisations were allowed to claim to be full persons, this would mean that the latter criticisms were valid. The proposed account goes between the horns of the above dilemma: impersonal aggregates or full persons. It avoids both the reductive individualism and expansive, full personhood account. It gives grounds for attributing and distributing praise and blame to organisations as whole complex entities, and to their parts. Primarily, responsibility belongs to Board incumbents within them, on the basis of their goals; their direction of the acts of the other main internal role incumbents, managers and staff, and enablers, in the role structure; their own ethical decision methods; the impact of their acts on external stakeholders like end-users, other players in the practice or local community, and on the state. These factors are picked out on the basis of a theory of meaning Aristotle’s theory of analogy of attribution, some architectonic features of his Philosophical Anthropology; and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (NAVE). The paper expounds a quasi-person model of organisations, (QPM), previously described in this journal (Ardagh 2011, 2012, 2013). This model identifies functional similarities at three levels, between capacities within natural persons (NPs) on the one hand and the roles/ incumbents within the structure of organisational artificial/quasi-persons (APs on the other). In each entity, we find an architectonic direction, sub-ordered operational entities, and enablers (a DOE structure) in a communicative structure or reporting chain of authority. The common elements between natural persons (NP) and artificial persons (AP) and their ethically relevant attributes are captured in an acronym –GRAEOS. Both persons and organisations have a “top” entity capable of having/choosing worthwhile ethically permissible goals, G; of architectonically directing the use of capacities/repertoires or incumbents in designed architectonic roles, R, within a DOE-type structure, well or badly; of using ethical decision making procedures, E; of execution of good choices for the person or organisation in action, A, with good or bad impacts on others, or with others, O, in the context practice or domain; and of having good relations with the law and the state, S. Application to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, and public sector organisations, is briefly discussed to illustrate the potential to deal with short or long case study narratives. (shrink)

Bicchieri's topic is the modeling of interaction between decision makers in situations in which the outcome of the interaction depends on what the parties jointly do. Examples include chess, firms competing for business, politicians competing for votes, jury members deciding on a verdict, animals fighting over prey, bidders competing in auctions, threats and punishments in long-term relationships. Rationality assumptions are a basic ingredient of game theory, but though rational choice might be unproblematic in normative decision theory, it becomes problematic in (...) interactive contexts, where the outcome of one’s choice depends on the actions of other agents. Another basic ingredient is the idea of equilibrium play: roughly, an equilibrium is a combination of strategies, one for each player, such that each player’s strategy is a best reply to the other players’ choices. Thus it is individually rational for each agent to play her equilibrium strategy; but, notoriously, such individually rational play can lead to sub-optimal outcomes, as in the well-known prisoner’s dilemma. The relationship between rationality assumptions and equilibrium play is Bicchieri’s main focus. (shrink)

The discussion on mandatory turnout, which controversially introduces coercion at the heart of the electoral process, illustrates a dilemma between increasing voter turnout on the one hand and avoiding coercion on the other. If successful, a recent proposal by Elliott solves this dilemma as it removes the compulsory element of mandatory turnout. Specifically, Elliot reinterprets the policy’s purpose as (a) a pre-commitment device for those who believe that they have a duty to vote and (b) a nudge to the surveillance (...) of politics for those who do not believe this. We critically evaluate Elliott’s novel intervention in the debate and argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. Mandatory turnout can be interpreted as neither a pre-commitment device nor a nudge. Moreover, we present a more promising and novel solution to the dilemma: a genuine state-administered pre-commitment device with respect to voting that also nudges citizens to vote and seems _prima facie_ attractive. (shrink)

The paper intends to study the possibility of evading the relativist dilemma: when you compare cultural forms belonging to different traditions, you either impose the result from outside, or you give up comparisons altogether as dependent on the arbiter’s parochial choices. In this paper one argues that, apart from this kind of comparison, which is called extrinsic, there is another type, called intrinsic, which is not dependent on arbiter’s choices. The essence of the intrinsic comparison is the role played by (...) the “second option” of the representatives of different traditions: it is decisive what these representatives prefer in the second place, when their first options have to be abandoned. Two old stories provide the historical paradigm of the intrinsic comparison: how Volga Khazarians are said to have converted to Judaism in the 8th century, and how the Athenian general Themistocles was voted the best general by the confederate Greek representatives. An example of contemporary intrinsic comparison between three contemporary trends – relativism, fundamentalism, rationalism – is also presented. Contrary to what Ernest Gellner believes, these trends are not incommensurable; rationalism takes precedence while being the second option of the other two trends, as soon as they want to enter a public debate. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give (...) readers new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

Mental and neural states are related to one another by vertical interlevel relations and by horizontal intralevel relations. For particular choices of such relations, problems arise if causal efficacy is ascribed to mental states. In a series of influential papers and books, Kim has presented his much discussed “supervenience argument,” which ultimately amounts to the dilemma that mental states either are causally inefficacious or they hold the threat of overdetermining neural states. Forced by this disjunction, Kim votes in favor of (...) overdetermination and, ultimately, reduction. We propose a perspective on mental causation that dissolves the assumption of a tension between horizontal and vertical determination. For mental states to be causally efficacious, they must be dynamically stable. This important requirement can be implemented by combining a key idea of supervenience, multiple realization, with the recently introduced vertical interlevel relation of contextual emergence. Both together deflate Kim's dilemma and reflate the causal efficacy of mental states. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface That an overtly white-nationalist misogynist demagogue was voted into power in the United States is cause for alarm and despair. As the election results sink in and analyses take shape, we at Feminist Studies mark this moment via poetry, a tradition of feminist expression that we have long nurtured. We include in this issue a special section on poems responding to the election. Raw by necessity, they allow (...) for a collective processing of feelings experienced in this moment, even as we prepare for the courage and acuity needed in days ahead. The scholarly works in this issue offer reflections on the travels of the term gender: in French Canadian feminist circles; the misreadings of gender and sexuality in histories of post-WWII New York City; and the gains and gaps in activism against gender-based violence and inequality. Geneviève Pagé recounts how the term gender was taken up in French Canadian scholarship, while Alix Genter offers a visual history of what butchness meant in 1950s and 1960s New York City. Julie R. Enszer tracks the representation of women writers through literary grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts and in Norton anthologies, making the case that gender parity remains an elusive goal. Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck narrates the 1980 horror film The Shining as a commentary on violence against women and child abuse that uses the Gothic form to salutary effect. Nikki Lane reviews recent scholarship in black queer ethnography, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor introduces us to the feminist eco-art of Pamela Longobardi. Our featured poets, apart from our special section, are Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Karen An-hwei Lee. Our closing forum on trigger warnings narrates the innovative practices that Alexis Lothian and Ramzi Fawaz propose in response to a contentious pedagogical debate. 560Preface Geneviève Pagé describes the history of the journey of the term gender in feminist circles in Montreal, using this case to comment on the dilemmas that arise from Anglocentrism in feminism. Pagé argues that in many ways, the term gender was not well suited to the context she highlights: Quebec feminists already possessed an intellectual infrastructure for referencing the meanings of the term gender through alternative phrasing, such as rapport sociaux de sexe. Furthermore, the grammatical concept of genre was “a concept central to the French language, but only peripheral in the English language,” and therefore, its use in French carried a potential “naturalizing” connotation. Nonetheless, given the dominance of English in feminist theory, Pagé concludes that “the polysemic nature of gender” allowed “for a fluid and multiple account of the local and global processes at work in the construction of women and men” in this context. Alix Genter gives us a nuanced understanding of butch genders and butch-femme aesthetics. Rather than relying on a stereotypical version of the 1950s queerly legible butch in masculine clothes, Genter argues that butchness itself was visually nuanced and coded in different ways than expected. Referencing a rich archive of 1950s-era photographs, Genter demonstrates that butch-identified women “conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions.” This approach to butch aesthetics and lesbian self-representation opens up the common notion of a strict butch-femme contrast and introduces the concept of conscious mutual survival between the two lesbian identities. The appreciation of nuance continues in Nikki Lane’s review essay of reflexive ethnographic research about black queer communities. Lane’s review of recent work by Jafari S. Allen, Marlon Bailey, Mignon Moore, and Mireille Miller-Young highlights the attention these authors give to the complex politics of sexuality in everyday experiences of black communities. With an emphasis on the illuminating potential of ethnography and qualitative methodologies, Lane discusses how each text adds to our understanding of processes of “racialization, gendering, and sexualization.” Lane concludes that black queer and feminist ethnographic methods help accrue an embodied knowledge—the “flesh”—of black queer experience. Preface 561 The art featured in this issue is by Pamela Longobardi, who uses found-plastic objects to create painting, sculptures, installations, assemblages, photographs, and community-art projects. As an artist with training in biology, Longobardi focuses on the... (shrink)

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violations by the decision-making agent—individual or group—are necessary and sufficient for path-dependence. Second, under some conditions, path-dependence is unavoidable in decisions made by (...) groups. Third, path-dependence makes decisions vulnerable to strategic agenda setting and strategic voting. I also discuss escape routes from path-dependence. My results are relevant to discussions on collective consistency and reason-based decision-making, focusing not only on outcomes, but also on underlying reasons, beliefs, and constraints. (shrink)

The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that (...) make them super-rich, i.e., pay a 100 % tax on their wealth above a certain level, or, (ii) they must forfeit some of their political rights. These rights include entitlements to fund political parties; to stand for office; and to work or volunteer for political parties. The right to vote, though, is not limited. I defend my proposal against non-consequentialist and consequentialist objections. I also argue that it avoids two problems that many attempts to reduce political inequality face; these are the political egalitarian’s dilemma and the problem of political equality’s relative moral importance. (shrink)

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...) decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation. (shrink)