Mathias Risse

What We Owe to the Global Poor

This essay defends an account of the duties to the global poor that is informed by the empirical question of what makes countries rich or poor, and that tends to be broadly in agreement with John Rawls’s account in The Law of Peoples. I begin by introducing the debate about the sources of growth and explore its implications for duties towards the poor. Next I explore whether (and deny that) there are any further-reaching duties towards the poor. Finally, I ask about the moral foundations for the duties to the poor of the sort that earlier parts argue there are.

What to Say About the State

In an increasingly interconnected world it has become hard to say what actually is so special about the state, and why there would be duties of any sort that apply among fellow citizens, but not among those who do not share a state. This study explains how dealing with this problem has become inevitable; discusses the most promising accounts of the normative peculiarity of states (in terms of coercive structures), and, finding some fault with these specific accounts (which are due to Michael Blake and Thomas Nagel), offers a modified version of this approach in terms of coercive structures.

Why the count de Borda cannot beat the Marquis de Condorcet

Although championed by the Marquis the Condorcet and many others, majority rule has often been rejected as indeterminate, incoherent, or implausible. Majority rules arch competitor is the Borda count, proposed by the Count de Borda, and there has long been a dispute between the two approaches. In several publications, Donald Saari has recently presented what is arguably the most vigorous and systematic defense of Borda ever developed, a project Saari has supplemented with equally vigorous objections to majority rule. In this article I argue that both Saaris objections to majority rule and his positive case for the Borda count fail. I hold the view that defenders of Condorcet cannot muster arguments to convince supporters of Borda, and vice versa, but here I am only concerned to show that the Count de Borda cannot beat the Marquis de Condorcet. Saaris approach displays what I take to be widespread fallacies in reasoning about social choice worthy of closer analysis. This debate bears on important questions in the philosophy of social choice theory.

Does left-libertarianism have coherent foundations?

Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Some philosophers find left-libertarianism promising because it seems that it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting such equality. However, the main goal of this article is to argue that, as far as coherence is concerned, at least one formulation of left-libertarianism is in trouble. This formulation is that of Michael Otsuka, who published it first in a 1998 article, and now in his thought-provoking book Libertarianism Without Inequality. In a nutshell, my objection is that the set of reasons that support egalitarian ownership of natural resources as Otsuka understands it stand in a deep tension with the set of reasons that would prompt one to endorse Otsuka’s right to self-ownership. In light of their underlying commitments, a defender of either of the views that left-libertarianism combines would actually have to reject the other. This incoherence, it seems, can only be remedied either by an approach that renders left-libertarianism incomplete in a way that can only be fixed by endorsing more commitments than most left-libertarians would want to or by an approach that leaves left-libertarianism a philosophically shallow theory.

Arrow's Theorem, Indeterminacy, and Multiplicity Reconsidered*

In early 1652, the committee for the governance of the Spanish royal household considered the vacancy in the office of aposentador mayor de palacio, a function combining artistic and administrative duties. The five committee members evaluated four candidates, among them Diego de Velazquez. When each of them submitted a ranking of the candidates to the king, Velazquez was ranked second by one committee member, third by two, and fourth by another two. Had the king wanted to derive a group ranking from the individual rankings, he would have faced a problem of aggregation. Social choice theory explores questions of aggregation formally. One of its branches starts with individual preference rankings (such as those of the committee members with respect to the candidates) and investigates possibilities of deriving collective preference rankings from them in accordance with reasonable and natural conditions. More precisely, this branch of social choice theory investigates which sets of such conditions on aggregation can be satisfied simultaneously. Fortunately, the king appointed Velazquez without further ado and despite his unflattering placements, but twentieth-century political philosophers need to look more closely into questions of aggregation.1 An early negative result in social choice theory that has received considerable attention is Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, ac-

The Second Treatise in In the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the Origin of the Bad Conscience

On a postcard to Franz Overbeck from January 4, 1888, Nietzsche makes some illuminating remarks with respect to the three treatises in his book On the Genealogy of Morality.2 Nietzsche says that, ‘for the sake of clarity, it was necessary artificially to isolate the different roots of that complex structure that is called morality. Each of these three treatises expresses a single primum mobile; a fourth and fifth are missing, as is even the most essential (‘the herd instinct’) – for the time being, the latter had to be ignored, as too comprehensive, and the same holds for the ultimate summation of all those different elements and thus a final account of morality.’ Nietzsche also points out that each treatise makes a contribution to the genesis of Christianity and rejects an explanation of Christianity in terms of only one psychological category. The topics of the treatises are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (first treatise), the ‘bad conscience’ (second), and the ‘ascetic ideal’ (third). The postcard suggests that Nietzsche discusses these topics separately because a joint treatment is too complicated, but that in reality, these ideas are inextricably intertwined, both with each other and with others that Nietzsche omits. Therefore, the three treatises should be regarded as parts of a unified theory and critique of morality. Nietzsche’s remarks on that postcard are important because in the Genealogy itself, he makes little effort to show the unity among the treatises. We shall return to this postcard repeatedly.3 The first treatise has attracted most scholarly attention, but much less work has been done on the second treatise, ‘ “Debts”, “Bad Conscience”, and Related Matters’. This is unfortunate, since it seems that, in Nietzsche’s own view, the central notion of the second treatise, namely, the bad conscience as a feeling of guilt, is a key element of Christian morality. Therefore, understanding Nietzsche’s treatment of this notion is essential to understanding his views on Christianity and the impact of the Christian heritage on non-religious moral philosophy. At the same time, however, the second treatise confronts the reader with considerable exegetical difficulties. In particular, Nietzsche’s remarks about the bad conscience itself make it hard to conceive of them as contributions to a coherent account of the same concept. Ridley’s 1998 study of the Genealogy finds no way of making sense of all of them and ends up classifying several remarks on the bad

What Equality of Opportunity Could Not Be

A This study is concerned with John Roemer’s Equality of Opportunity. I argue that his theory is committed to compatibilism but that one of its central claims is plausible only within a libertarian view on the free-will problem. Thus Roemer’s theory is troubled by a deep structural incoherence and should be rejected as an account of equality of opportunity. Let me briefly introduce some background to Roemer’s theory. Contemporary egalitarians face two major challenges: first, they need

Fairness in trade I: obligations from trading and the Pauper-Labor Argument

Standard economic theory teaches that trade benefits all countries involved, at least in the long run. While there are other reasons for trade liberalization, this insight, going back to Ricardos 1817 Principles of Political Economy , continues to underlie international economics. Trade also raises fairness questions. First, suppose A trades with B while parts of As population are oppressed. Do the oppressed in A have a complaint in fairness against B? Should B cease to trade? Second, suppose because of oppression or lower social standards, As products are cheaper than Bs. Can industries in B legitimately insist that their government take measures to help them compete? The Pauper-Labor Argument makes that case, and many economists enjoy dismissing it in undergraduate classes. Third, suppose A subsidizes its industries. If this lowers world market prices, does B have a fairness complaint against A? Ought countries to consider how trade policies affect others? This article is the first of two, which together develop a view that is meant to serve as a reference point for moral assessments of international trade policies. I develop this view by way of offering affirmative answers to these three questions. Since this discussion is organized around these three questions, the two studies can be read independently of each other.

What Is Rational About Nash Equilibria

Nash Equilibrium is a central concept ingame theory. It has been argued that playing NashEquilibrium strategies is rational advice for agentsinvolved in one-time strategic interactions capturedby non-cooperative game theory. This essaydiscusses arguments for that position: vonNeumann–Morgensterns argument for their minimaxsolution, the argument from self-enforcingagreements, the argument from the absence ofprobabilities, the transparency-of-reasons argument,the argument from regret, and the argument fromcorrelated equilibrium. All of these argumentseither fail entirely or have a very limited scope.Whatever the use of Nash Equilibrium is, therefore,it is not useful as a rational recommendation inone-time strategic interactions. This is good newsfor Bayesians: although this discussion does notargue directly for the Bayesian idea of rationalityas expected utility maximization, it argues againsta position that has been regarded as a contender insituations of strategic interaction.

Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Preference Aggregation after Harsanyi

Introduction Consider a group of people whose preferences satisfy the axioms of one of the current versions of utility theory, such as von Neumann–Morgenstern (1944), Savage (1954), or Bolker (1965)and Jeffrey (1965). There are political and economic contexts in which it is of interest to find ways of aggregating these individual preferences into a group preference ranking. The question then arises of whether methods of aggregation exist in which the groups preferences also satisfy the axioms of the chosen utility theory, while at the same time the aggregation process satisfies certain plausible conditions (e.g., the Pareto conditions introduced later). The answer to this question is sensitive to details of the chosen utility theory and method of aggregation. Much depends on whether uncertainty, expressed in terms of probabilities, is present in the framework and, if so, on how the probabilities are aggregated. The goal of this chapter is (a) to provide a conceptual map of the field of preference aggregation – with special emphasis, prompted by the occasion, on Harsanyis aggregation result and its relations to other results – and (b) to present a new problem (“flipping”), which leads to a new impossibility result. The story begins with some bad news, roughly fifty years old, about “purely ordinal” frameworks, in which probabilities play no role. Arrows General Possibility Theorem (1950, 1951, 1963) : No universally applicable nondictatorial method of aggregating individual preferences into group preferences can satisfy both the Pareto Preference condition (unanimous individual preferences are group preferences) and the condition of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (group preference between two prospects depends only on individual preferences between those same prospects) .