Fabienne Peter

GENDER AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL CHOICE: THE ROLE OF SITUATED AGENCY

Amartya Sen defends a rich conception of social choice theory against tendencies to limit social choice theory to the formal investigation of rules of collective decision-making. His understanding of social choice theory makes the field a natural candidate for exploring gender issues in the evaluation of democratic policy. Not surprisingly, Sen has applied the insights he developed from his study of social choice to the evaluation of gender inequality, in particular to womens well-being in the context of the family. I focus on Sens distinction between well-being and agency, and argue that from the perspective of womens movements and related social movements, the role of agency has so far been unduly neglected in social choice theory.

CHOICE, CONSENT, AND THE LEGITIMACY OF MARKET TRANSACTIONS

According to an often repeated definition, economics is the science of individual choices and their consequences. The emphasis on choice is often used – implicitly or explicitly – to mark a contrast between markets and the state: While the price mechanism in well-functioning markets preserves freedom of choice and still efficiently coordinates individual actions, the state has to rely to some degree on coercion to coordinate individual actions. Since coercion should not be used arbitrarily, coordination by the state needs to be legitimized by the consent of its citizens. The emphasis in economic theory on freedom of choice in the market sphere suggests that legitimization in the market sphere is “automatic†and that markets can thus avoid the typical legitimization problem of the state. In this paper, I shall question the alleged dichotomy between legitimization in the market and in the state. I shall argue that it is the result of a conflation of choice and consent in economics and show how an independent concept of consent makes the need for legitimization of market transactions visible.

Pure Epistemic Proceduralism

In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism – the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject instrumentalism on two grounds: (i) because it fails to respect reasonable value pluralism and to recognize the constitutive role of democratic procedures for legitimacy in pluralist societies, and (ii) because it neglects the constructive function of democratic decision-making. I then consider two alternatives to pure epistemic proceduralism: David Estlund’s version of epistemic proceduralism and a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy. I argue that only pure epistemic proceduralism can make good on both shortcomings of instrumentalism, whereas each of the other two approaches only makes good on one and neglects the other.

The procedural epistemic value of deliberation

Collective deliberation is fuelled by disagreements and its epistemic value depends, inter alia, on how the participants respond to each other in disagreements. I use this accountability thesis to argue that deliberation may be valued not just instrumentally but also for its procedural features. The instrumental epistemic value of deliberation depends on whether it leads to more or less accurate beliefs among the participants. The procedural epistemic value of deliberation hinges on the relationships of mutual accountability that characterize appropriately conducted deliberation. I will argue that it only comes into view from the second-person standpoint. I shall explain what the second-person standpoint in the epistemic context entails and how it compares to Stephen Darwall’s interpretation of the second-person standpoint in ethics.

Epistemic Foundations of Political Liberalism

At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on justification from the third-person perspective. But why should we take disagreements seriously? This – epistemic question – has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public.

Symposium on rationality and commitment: Introduction

In his critique of rational choice theory, Amartya Sen claims that committed agents do not (or not exclusively) pursue their own goals. This claim appears to be nonsensical since even strongly heteronomous or altruistic agents cannot pursue other peoples goals without making them their own. It seems that self-goal choice is constitutive of any kind of agency. In this paper, Sens radical claim is defended. It is argued that the objection raised against Sens claim holds only with respect to individual goals. Not all goals, however, are individual goals; there are shared goals, too. Shared goals are irreducible to individual goals, as the argument from we-derivativeness and the argument from normativity show. It is further claimed that an adequate account of committed action defies both internalism and externalism about practical reason.

Sen's Idea of Justice and the locus of normative reasoning

Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice (IJ) shows what I think is the right way forward in thinking about justice. John Rawls’ (1971) Theory of Justice (TJ) has been dominating political philosophy for a long time now and however fruitful his contribution was, the marginal benefits of further exploring the theory of justice as fairness as he put it forward in that book may well be finite. There are other efforts too to overcome the Rawlsian dominance. But of the proposals that primarily attract attention today, Sen’s, I think, is by far the most attractive and promising. In a nutshell, what Sen proposes is this. Justice should be understood as a movement away from what are perceived to be problematic social arrangements – relationships, institutions or distributive patterns. Sen calls this concept of justice nyaya, which means ‘justice’ in Sanskrit (p. 21). But there is a second word for ‘justice’ in Sanskrit – niti. Sen associates niti with another tradition in Indian ethics and jurisprudence. According to this tradition, the concept of justice is understood as concerned with a set of principles that ideally govern social institutions and individual behavior, where what is considered ideal is quite independent of actual social arrangements. Sen argues that Rawls’ ‘transcendental institutionalist’ theory of justice as fairness, as he proposed it in his 1971 book, is a typical example of justice as niti. Other examples in this tradition are G. A. Cohen’s (2008) Rescuing Justice and Equality and Robert Nozick’s (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sen rejects the niti concept of justice; instead of identifying principles that ideally characterize just institutions or just behavior, justice should be concerned with improving how we live together in this – our – world. Specifically, Sen proposes a conception of justice based on Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. Sen argues that justice as niti is neither necessary nor sufficient (pp. 98– 102). It is not sufficient because even when justice as niti is preserved, problematic social arrangements might still prevail. To give an example from the context of Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness, even in a society where the basic structure satisfies the two principles of justice, injustices in the context of the family or in relation to the treatment of immigrants might still remain. Justice as niti is not necessary, according to Sen, because we might be able to bring about an improvement in social arrangements for reasons unrelated to, say, Rawls’ two principles of justice. Before I say more about Sen’s idea of justice, I want to contrast justice as either niti or nyaya with a further approach that is currently discussed. Some contemporary theorists favor Hume’s evolutionary approach, which tries to eschew as far as possible the normative dimension. Let me focus on Ken Binmore’s Natural Justice here. Binmore’s view is that Rawls is right about the content of norms of justice but wrong about the need

Second-personal reason-giving

David Enoch has recently objected to Stephen Darwall’s account of second-personal reason-giving that the phenomena that Darwall focuses on can be fully explained without resorting to second-personal reasons. In this paper, I shall argue, against Enoch, that second-personal reason-giving matters. My account of second-personal reason-giving differs from Darwall’s however, as it accepts that some of the phenomena Darwall focuses on can be reduced to the more standard form of reason-giving.

Democratic Legitimacy without Collective Rationality

Much recent writing on the philosophy of democracy has either explicitly or implicitly assumed that the rationality of democratic decisions is an important feature of their legitimacy. Different theories of democracy postulate different rationality requirements. Kenneth Arrow’s response to the problem of cycling in democratic votes, for example, is to demand that collective decisions be based on social preferences that satisfy the same rationality requirements as those economists typically impose on individual preferences. A similar move can be identified in Philip Pettit’s response to what he calls the discursive dilemma, which generates a conflict between the collective evaluation of an outcome and the collective evaluation of an independent set of premises that is logically connected to the outcome. He argues that the possibility of such dilemmas make it necessary for legitimacy that democratic decisions satisfy rationality requirements which ensure consistency between the evaluation of the premises and the evaluation of the outcomes. In this chapter, I want to challenge these responses and argue against the view that democratic decisions need to satisfy such consistency-based requirements of collective rationality.

Justice : political, not natural

Abstract Ken Binmore casts his naturalist theory of justice in opposition to theories of justice that claim authority on the grounds of some religious or moral doctrine. He thereby overlooks the possibility of a political conception of justice−a theory of justice based on the premise that there is an irreducible pluralism of metaphysical, epistemological, and moral doctrines. In my brief comment I shall argue that the naturalist theory of justice advocated by Binmore should be conceived of as belonging to one family of such doctrines, but not as overriding a political conception of justice.